


Typhoid and Swans

by NoFootprintsInSand



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: AU, But Mainly Following The TV Series, Canon Mash-Up, Captivity, Dark Will Graham, F/M, Fracture of Self, Fucked Up Triad, Hannibal Is Basically Lucifer, M/M, Murder Husbands, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Possessive Behavior, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Ravenstag, Rough Sex, Stockholm Syndrome, The Dark Stag, Unhealthy Relationships, loss of self, m/m/f
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:34:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24358159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoFootprintsInSand/pseuds/NoFootprintsInSand
Summary: "The first time Clarice sees the stag she is walking in the woods around Will Graham’s old Wolf Trap home."With her mentor and friend Jack Crawford dead, and her once-promising career in shambles, Clarice Starling decides to find out what really happened to Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham.
Relationships: Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling, Will Graham/Clarice Starling, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling
Comments: 85
Kudos: 171





	1. prelude to capture

* * *

The first time Clarice sees the stag she is walking in the woods around Will Graham’s old Wolf Trap home. 

She arrives too late in the day; it’s almost dusk. She parks her car way down the drive, out of sight of the house, and walks the last few hundred yards.

She does not go inside the house itself, it is long since repossessed and sold. She briefly stands before it and takes it in. The chipped wood, the homeliness, the faded comfort so at odds with whom Will turned out to be. She looks at the old porch and imagines him sitting out there with his pack of dogs, she glances at the barn and wonders if he butchered and arranged Randall Tier in there.

Then she turns her back on it and heads for the river, walks along it for a spell. It’s frozen over, fervent motion turned to ice, but she conjures up Will here in summer. Standing thigh deep in the stream with his lures, being happy, _quiet,_ somewhere else. She sees him pulling out fish after trashing fish, gleaming in the sunlight with their struggles. 

She doesn’t know Will Graham, but she can imagine him fishing. 

Clear as day.

She moves towards the treeline. They are dark, the woods, but they are calling out to her all the same. So she heeds, wanders beneath laden pines, and her breath is frost and her vision is white. All is silent and she feels weightless, otherworldly, she fancies she leaves no footprints in the virgin snow. 

She is here just trying to get a sense, perhaps just a faint whisper on the wind, of the troubled man who once lived here. But all she gets is eerie stillness, and that stillness is moving her deeper into the woods, away from the house. Darkness is falling, slowly at first, a sinuous beast made of shadows, stretching and yawning and rubbing about her ankles. She knows about winter dusks though. Soon it will pounce, and all will be dark. 

But that is not important right now. There is a beating susurrus, the shadows curl and spiral, but she is not afraid. 

She moves deeper. And she loses track a little bit, perhaps she is walking in circles, perhaps it doesn’t matter.

And then suddenly, caught right between two seconds, she sees a dark stag looking at her from beneath an enormous tree. Maple, she thinks absently, and ancient. The stag does not seem afraid of her, it meets her gaze steadily. It stands so very still, a statue carved out of petrified lava. But she can see its flanks moving, can see its breath billowing in the frosty air, can see planets and stars orbiting its antlers.

They stand in the quiet looking at each other, and she’s about to lose her grip on time Then the creature slowly backs away into the shadows, and she lets out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d held.

Only later, on her drive back to Quantico, does she really reflect on the _feathers_. 

But by then she is sure she is wrong, saw wrong. 

* * *

  
There is nothing left. 

She’s got _nothing left._

Her career is over thanks to the Evelda Drumgo fiasco, that botched arrest, bullets flying all around a screaming baby. Scapegoated, pushed out, ostracised, thrown under the bus. Whatever you want to call it, and her loathing for Paul Krendler burns white hot and eager.

Jack Crawford - mentor, father figure, rock - is rotting in a too-early grave. His heart gave in, and she blames Dr. Hannibal Lecter just as much as she blames Bella’s death. More. She blames Lecter _more._ She doesn’t have all the details, was never privy to all the intricacies of Jack Crawford’s machinations, but she is convinced whatever transpired with Lecter, Will Graham and Francis Dolarhyde killed him just as surely as his broken heart.

She had asked to interview Dr. Lecter once, back when she was a trainee and he was incarcerated under Dr. Alana Bloom’s care in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. When Jack had her working the Buffalo Bill case. She had asked because she knew Lecter would be able to provide invaluable insights. He’d done it before, after all, albeit out of captivity.

And she had asked because of her need to be better, always better, than from whence she came. Better than her past, better than her blood. The belief that only when she’s become the very _best_...that’s when the pleas of victims everywhere will quiet down, silence. Die.

Jack had refused her request, something like real horror in his eyes, and in the end she had caught Jame Gumb anyway. Afterwards she had heard the talk about Miriam Lass, and better understood why he had said no. 

But she regrets his decision now, just as she did then. Because had she stood before Hannibal Lecter, _seen_ him, exchanged words with him...then she might have a piece of him now, the way he himself collected pieces of people. She might clutch a shard of his mind in her fist, jagged and vicious, her palm bleeding red but it would be worth it to hold him. She might have known him just a little bit, have more than the fractured mosaic she’s gained by illicitly going through transcripts and boxes of evidence and video interrogations and newspaper clippings.

As for Will Graham...he had quit as a lecturer before her arrival at the academy, and by the time the Tooth Fairy happened she was working different cases. Jack never brought her in. She had caught some glimpses of Graham at Quantico though, when Jack brought him out of retirement and on to the case and back into Lecter’s clutches. 

But she hadn’t truly paid much attention until Lecter and Graham disappeared into thin air.

Now she's reading his papers. She devours his case notes. She’s watching video recordings of his lectures over and over and over. She can’t stop _looking_ at him. 

A slight, twitchy man, handsome but hiding. Eyes always faraway and inward at the same time, and mind a knife stabbing straight through every single crime scene.

She’s jealous of his otherworldly ability, his empathy. She thinks of the people she could save if she had it, she could silence so many _pleas_.

And no one knows where he is. No one knows if he’s alive. If Lecter is alive. 

Well. She’s got will. She’s got a small cache of savings, stubbornly squirreled away since forever. She suspects that with the way things are going she will soon have nothing but time. She will find them, or find out what happened to them. She will. She _will_. 

For Jack.

* * *

Alana Bloom refuses to have anything to do with her, but Clarice manages to catch her unaware and scrounges a short phone call. The line sounds tinny, crackles, as if Alana is far away. In a different country. Clarice rather supposes she is. 

Alana’s voice is cold, flat. 

“Listen. Sure, the first protégée of Crawford’s that went after Lecter did come back, but minus one arm and her entire mind. The next _joined_ him. Think carefully, Agent Starling.”

She pounces at that, near delirious at this whiff of something _tangible_. 

“So you think they might be alive? Both of them? Lecter and Graham? The theory around here is that Lecter killed Graham, then escaped for good.” 

Alana is quiet for such a long while Clarice thinks she might have hung up. Then her voice comes back, and it is not dull anymore. It is full of hurt and betrayal and broken bones. 

“I’m not sure someone like Hannibal can die.” Her voice cracks, becomes more splintered still. “And if it is possible for him to keep Will alive, then he will. He....cherishes Will. In his own way. And Will can’t be happy without Hannibal. If there is a way for them to be together, then trust me, Agent Starling, they are.”

Then her voice goes emotionless again. Void. 

“I strongly advise you not to go near this. Remember Beverly Katz.”

Then she hangs up. 

* * *

Frederick Chilton next, and he is much keener to see her, to talk. 

A pity only that he’s without his lips.

His lack of lips does not stop him from trying to communicate, and she doesn't understand how he’s still alive. He will never again leave the hospital. He clings to his life support, reclines as if on needles in his hyperbaric chamber, graft after graft after graft, and yet he _burns_ to tell her things. And after some time with him she learns to better understand his lipless words, even as fervent and pained and cut off at each end as they are. Because he wants someone to listen. He wants someone to know. How he came to be ruined. How Will Graham and Jack Crawford set him up, tossed him into the fires of the Great Dragon. How Hannibal was always a monster, and Will Graham became one too.

She leaves knowing that Chilton is another one thinking that Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter disappeared together.

It’s when she steps outside the hospital she sees the stag again. It’s standing across the road, between two parked cars, and its gaze is solemn and inscrutable. The feathers on its legs and hind and neck are clearly visible now, in daylight; a shimmering black with darkest purples and greens and blues, like rainbows in oil, where the dull afternoon sun hits the plumage. 

The light hits something else too – she strains her eyes and sees. Dark scales, like fish scales, scattered on the creature’s flank. Ricocheting and bending light with each breath the beast takes.

She can’t breathe. 

It looks at her, and there is archaic history in its eyes, ancient tales and life and _murder_. 

Then it turns and walks away among the cars.

A hallucination, she realises. Not here. It had not been real in the woods in Wolf Trap either.

She is so familiar with all the different case notes by now, with the photographs and the transcripts, that it doesn’t take her long to piece a broken, incomplete picture together. Garett Jacob Hobb’s hunting room. Cassie Boyle impaled on the head of a stag. Hannibal Lecter’s office. 

Stags and antlers everywhere, and no wonder that her busy, tired mind might conjure one up. But she doesn’t understand the feathers or the scales. She doesn’t understand why she is seeing things that aren’t there. She feels in freefall, violent and unchecked, snagging on antler tines on her way down. 

What is the significance?

She drives home, and she doesn’t tell Ardelia anything. She doesn’t tell her anything at all.

* * *

  
She can find no trace of Dr. Bedelia du Maurier. None whatsoever. 

She shivers, but she keeps going, because she has chosen her path.

* * *

  
She finds Hannibal’s beach house almost by accident.

She had of course figured that he had more properties than just his Chandler Square residence. They had all figured that. He hadn’t kept Miriam Lass in a hole all that time, he hadn’t kept Abigail Hobbs permanently in the basement. The FBI had searched fruitlessly, and Hannibal had given them nothing at all during his trial or his stay at the state hospital.

Miriam Lass refuses to see her, talk to her, and Clarice doesn’t persevere. She might be single minded in her quest, hardened, but she can recognise that the other woman has been hurt beyond endurance and then further still. If she doesn’t want to talk then Clarice won’t insist on ripping open her wounds. Likely she can’t remember anyway, don’t have anything left now but the false memories Hannibal gave her.

She refuses to think about how she could end up like Miriam if she continues.

Perhaps lose a lot more than Miriam did.

Abigail Hobbs won’t talk to anyone ever again, and Clarice studies her photos with sadness. Surrounded by predators all her life, chewed up and spat out, large blue eyes brimming over with secrets taken to the grave. 

She will get nothing from Miriam and Abigail. 

But then, while going through the same boxes of evidence and old possessions as everyone else, she comes across a crumpled old receipt recovered from Hannibal’s house. From six years ago, petrol from a gas station in a little town in Delaware. At the time it had probably seemed an inconsequential piece of information, particularly with Hannibal having turned himself in.

But now...

She remembers how five years later the last confirmed sighting of Francis Dolarhyde had been in Delaware, after that botched transfer that saw several FBI agents dead and Lecter, Graham and Dolaryhyde vanished into thin air.

She brings up a map, pores over it, goes entirely on feeling. She doesn’t turn around, but she knows the stag is standing in one of the corners of the evidence room. She can hear it breathe, she can smell the musk and the forest and the darkness on its pelt as she glides over towns and villages and nature reserves. Vaguely she wonders if the beast will warn her if someone’s coming. Her already precarious position with the FBI will be further jeopardized if someone catches her with evidence she’s got no business handling.

Then she forgets all that when she hits upon a name on the map that speaks to her.

Slaughter Beach. 

The next day she drives out there because she doesn’t think Hannibal could possibly resist.

It takes her the best part of three days of driving up and down the coast, venturing onto private driveways, trespassing, looking, searching searching _searching_ before she finally comes upon the house. Secluded and tucked away and perched precariously right at the edge of the cliffs, about to crumble on down into the Atlantic.

She sees the police car half tucked away on the drive. The front door is unlocked. She walks through the house, runs her hand along the partly covered furniture, so expensive, so lush, so dusty and abandoned. She takes in the shattered wine bottle in the living room, the wine long since dried into the expensive rug. 

Then she steps through the broken patio doors out onto the terrace, and she finds the Dragon.

Salty winds and sunshine and rain have permanently altered the once fearsome, insane being. But she stands before him with something akin to esteem. She studies the shape of his wings made of blood, forever etched into the flagstone by weather and time. She travels across the parts of him turned to bone, bleached white by the Atlantic sun. She considers what she can see of his wounds. 

At least now she knows what happened to Francis Dolarhyde. 

And it looks as though he gave Hannibal Lecter a run for his money.

She stands on the very edge of the bluff looking down and out at the water, letting the wind blow her hair and her thoughts and her doubts every which way. She considers the crashing waves and the stag, the stag stands alongside her but about ten yards down, and it is looking at the waves too.

Francis Dolarhyde’s remains are sprawled behind her and there’s the faint smell of something she can’t name.

But perhaps that is just the mysteries tangled up in the pelt of the stag.

She walks back into the house and takes one last look around, looking for the detail that had scratched at her mind during her first walk through but eluded her. She stands stock still, and in her peripheral the stag out on the cliffs, as still as her and as focused, dark and forbidding and holding so many answers without telling her.

Then it hits her.

Two wine glasses. 

Two.

* * *

She calls in the find, then she books herself a trip. She knows that her unauthorised digging in the Lecter mess will be the last straw, the ultimate excuse, and she accepts it. And so the expected suspension becomes a reality and it’s a large piece of her identity attached to the badge that is no longer hers, so _large._ The largest part of her. She would be lost without this new purpose she’s given herself, it gives her the strength to ignore the gloating on Krendler’s face. 

And one day, one day she will _get_ him.

She flies to Italy for no other reason than that Hannibal had once fled here followed by Will and she wants to walk the streets they both walked, together and apart.

And anyway, she hasn’t had a vacation for years. 

Her budget is meagre, so she boards in a small village outside Florence, hires a beat up Skoda and drives into town every day. She walks slowly around the city, jostled by tourists and propelled forward by an inane conviction that she will know what she is looking for when she sees it. She tries to catch feelings and thoughts and clues out of thin air, and now the stag is there, always there. Behind her, before her, alongside her. Disappearing into crowds, reappearing again.

Always in the corner of her eye, and she’s stopped being scared of it and she can’t remember when.

She haunts the Palazzo Capponi, asks questions no one wants to answer, stirs memories no one wants to remember. Considers the courtyard, where Hannibal gave a policeman the death of Judas.

She wanders around the Uffizi, sits in front of _La Primavera_ for hours and hours. 

And she carries a letter to Ardelia in her pocket. One that explains everything. She hasn't posted it yet, because that would make this...real. Right now she’s on vacation. Once that letter is posted it will be an acknowledgment that she has truly _departed_. That she’s on a hunt. That she might have found a lead, a trace, a scent. That she might be in danger.

That she might not come back.

* * *

  
She drives through the night all the way down to Palermo. To the Norman Palace. To the Capella Palatina.

She arrives with morning light awash on the ancient stones, with the intensity of smell and impressions that might not be her own, rather of those that have gone before her here. She breathes in Byzantium, she breathes in saints, she tries to burrow through the cracks in the mosaics for answers. How long last the memories of stones? 

It might be foolish, but how could she not go to the place where Hannibal Lecter once left Will Graham a Valentine? She’d seen the crime scene photos before she got suspended. Hannibal’s origami heart was something horrifically beautiful to behold.

The stag stands atop the memento mori on the floor, looking at her, waiting, and for the very first time she considers touching it.

But she daren’t. 

* * *

The call comes through on her long drive back up to Florence. Unknown number. She grapples with the cell phone, the steering wheel, with exhaustion, but manages to answer.

“Starling.” 

“Clarice Starling?”

That voice. A man’s voice, kicking at her brain, lodging deep inside. She wedges the phone more securely between her shoulder and ear, eases up on the gas. 

“Who is this?” 

“Listen to me. Stay away. You get any closer, I’m not sure I can convince him to leave you alone. I’m not sure I’d _want_ to.”

Of course she recognises his voice. How can she not, after listening to it for hours? Recordings of his lectures, his interrogations, his _trial_.

“Will? Will Graham? Where are you? Tell me! I promise I just want to talk.” 

His answer is immediate and his voice is hard.

“Forget it. End this now. I’m warning you only out of consideration for Jack.”

Olive groves are flying by, streaks of greens and blues and her heart tapping out a rhythm she’s never felt before. She thinks that might be blood in her mouth.

“Jack is dead.”

A silence that crackles, a voice gone soft. More like the voice she can remember from all the tapes. A little forlorn.

She likes his voice like that.

“I know.”

Then a long silence, and she’s terrified she might lose him, that he’ll hang up and this will be the closest she can ever get. 

“Just one thing. Please? Will? Are you there?” 

His voice comes back, and so hard again, like the stones in the Norman Palace, like the blade of Hannibal’s linoleum knife. 

“What is it?”

She breathes, considers, but she must ask. There was never a choice.

“What does it mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“The stag. The black one. I see it everywhere. It follows me.” 

Stuttering breaths, a sound as if he’s clutching the phone. 

“Oh Jesus,” he says, then he hangs up.

* * *

When she comes back to her boarding house a wreath of flowers is waiting for her by the door to her room. She picks it up as she unlocks the door, steps inside with an armful of blooms. 

She gingerly sets it down on the rickety old bedside table, considers it. It’s an artful yet wild arrangement, muted colours against dark greens. Belladonna and hemlock. Henbane and moonflower. Monkshood.

It’s very beautiful.

“Hello, Dr. Lecter,” she whispers into the poison, and she thinks she will have to post the letter to Ardelia now.

  
  



	2. capture

* * *

**Chapter 2: capture**

* * *

Clarice stays in Italy until her money runs out, and until her final hearing is due. She doesn’t hear from Will Graham again, and most certainly not from Hannibal Lecter. She unearths no new clues, no new knowledge, and she regrets posting the letter to Ardelia. Now she’s having to ignore her calls, responding to increasingly frantic voice messages from her friend with three word text messages. 

_I’m fine, Ardelia._

_Don’t worry, ok?_

_I’m back soon._

_Stop calling, please._

Clarice doesn’t recognise herself. She becomes someone else with the scent of prey in her nose, even if that scent is as weak as that of the flowers from Hannibal, drying on the wall above her narrow _locanda_ bed.

She learns to love Italy though.

Her ears, always sensitive to nuances, sink into the language almost without her noticing. She learns to pick out words from the rapid-fire vowels and consonants flying in the air around her. The noises become music, delicately tuned, full of life. 

She finds little places in Florence away from all the tourists, so prevalent even in off-season. She walks down narrow little alleyways, hand dragging along walls whose stones have trapped whispers of history within them, an ancient acoustic; faraway vibrations she fancies she can feel in her fingertips. She finds tiny little trattorias using sun-warmed tomatoes and vibrant sweet basil and pungent, salty parmesan and nothing else in their pasta dishes.

She returns to the Palazzo Vecchio and to Forti de Belvedere, no longer to badger the dusty old _Studiolos_ for information and clues about Hannibal’s tenure there, but rather to take it all in. She slips into something not quite like a dreamworld, surrounded by Dante and poetry and its words: fire and innocence and experience. All this old history and knowledge and art, tangling in her hair, sticking to her lips and eyelashes and skin, a beating, faraway susurrus in her ear. 

She takes the Škoda and drives along the fallow olive groves and hills and vineyards of Tuscany, all the windows down, wind sweeping her hair every which way. Her cell is always within easy reach on the passenger seat, but Will Graham doesn’t call again.

Yes, she can see why Hannibal loves Italy enough that he would return again and again. 

And the stag is with her, she senses it always at her back. She can see its scales gleaming and its feathers moving in the corner of her eye. It’s starting to become...comforting to have the creature near. She certainly smiles a little when she sees it in between the luggage conveyor belts at the airport.

She’s happy it’s travelling back to the States with her, that it’s not staying behind in Italy.

” _Addio, Firenze_ ,” she murmurs against the airplane window when high up in the air, and she watches how condensation turns her words into something else; archaic patterns and hieroglyphs she can’t decipher. 

* * *

She makes a decision on the plane back across the Atlantic, one she isn’t proud of. She makes it nonetheless, because knowing what she knows now it would be impossible for her to stop. The only question is if she’ll keep going with the resources of the FBI and the Justice Department behind her, or entirely on her own.

She cements her decision in the car own her way to the hearing. She puts her phone down after her brief conversation with Krendler and knows that there will be no turning back now, no matter the outcome. Then she speeds up. Best to get it over and done with quickly, before the bad taste on her tongue penetrates too deep, travels down her windpipe and unfurls in her lungs.

* * *

She hears hooves on the carpet behind her as she walks down the halls of the Department of Justice towards Krendler’s office. She thinks she can feel warm breath against the back of her hand, smell musk and decaying leaves, hear rushing water. See antlers reflected in office windows along the way. 

She doesn’t turn around.

She suspects Krendler agrees to see her before the hearing only because it gives him ample chance to gloat over her in private, to really dig his knife between her ribs before twisting it in public.

She’s right.

“Starling,” he greets without looking up as she enters his office, long neck bent over some papers on his desk that Clarice is sure aren’t important. He’s belittling her, and he’s attempting to take away from her that which she spent years working for, fighting towards. 

_Agent_. 

“What did you want? I don’t have long, so out with it.”

She hates him, she realises. It’s disgust and abhorrence that she is feeling right now, not just dislike. Actual hate, clean and sharp and intricately drawn in its ferocity. 

This petty little man has spent her entire career trying to trip her up, undo her, and for what? She doesn’t think that she has ever hated anyone else in her life, not even her father’s killer, but she hates Paul Krendler. He is trying to take away the very filaments of her, her cornerstones, her identity. Her career in law enforcement. Her law sanctioned ability to _help_ people. 

She is surprised at how even her voice is when she answers him, standing straight in front of his desk, digging her nails into the palm of her hand. 

“The Hannibal Lecter case. I want you to assign it to me.”

That gets his attention, and he throws down his pen, leans back in his five thousand dollar chair with his arms thrown behind his neck, and Clarice is having to fight not to bare her teeth at him.

“And why would I do that? We don’t even know if Lecter is alive. And if he is, the trail is freezing cold. No sightings since that botched transfer of Crawford’s. And you aren’t exactly flavour of the month, Starling. You’re about to be axed. You know it, I know it, everybody else know it.”

He smirks at her, and his lips are wet and his teeth shine dully. He looks precisely like the scavenger he is.

She draws a breath, wills herself not to lash out. 

“I found Hannibal Lecter’s other house. Where he killed Francis Dolarhyde. Where he kept Miriam Lass and Abigail Hobbs. DNA from both women was recovered there, wasn’t it, Mr Krendler?”

Krendler’s eyes gleam. Ugly eyes, small and dark and hungry. 

Her skin crawls.

“That’s correct, Starling. But so what? You found a cold trail. It’s been some years since whatever happened in that house. And you had no jurisdiction to dig. You handled evidence you’d not been authorised to handle. You think you can come here and make demands?” He scoffs. “You won’t even be able to ask for a cup of shitty coffee down in the canteen by the time I’m done with you.”

She throws one of her cards on the table, hard, hoping that the paper cut from it might be enough to tear his jugular.

“Will Graham called me when I was in Italy. Hannibal Lecter sent me flowers.” A deep breath. “They’re both alive.”

Krendler leans forward over his desk now, suddenly and she can see decisions whipping each other all over his face. Damning her and be done with it. Hearing her out and perhaps _reap_.

“And you didn’t report it?”

“I am reporting it now, Mr Krendler. I am willing to debrief, to turn over my phone, though I doubt you’ll get anything. I’d need it back though, in case Graham calls again.”

Greed for power seems to win out, at least for now.

“What _exactly_ is it you want, Starling?” 

She thought he’d never ask. 

“I want to find Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. I want you to provide me with the resources to do so. I want complete access to all evidence, all case files. No obstructions. I want to work on my own.”

Another card thrown on the table, only it’s not really a card, it’s a lure. She thinks Will Graham would understand.

“And when I find them, you’ll get all the credit. You. Your department. I don’t care. Take it all. That’s it, Mr Krendler. I do the work. You get the glory.”

_And you do so love glory, don’t you, you piece of shit?_

He’s leaning even further over the desk now, nostrils flared, scented to tender vulnerabilities, her soft underbelly.

“Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say they are both alive. Let’s say they did contact you and you’re not just making things up. Just how do you propose to do this? Better agents than you have tried and failed, Starling. _Much_ better.”

She digs her nails further into the palm of her hands, wills her heart to slow down and her revulsion to be less noticeable. She’s not sure she’s successful.

“Perhaps. But Lecter and Graham are aware of me now. They have both reached out, each in their own way, and may do so again if I make enough noise. In the meantime I think we should explore the luxury goods angle.” 

She draws a breath, tries to make her voice calm and emotionless. She can’t give away to Krendler how important this is to her. He would tear it from her in a heartbeat, just because. Spite and vindictiveness in his veins, not plasma and blood cells.

“Hannibal Lecter likes fine things. Expensive things. _Rare_ things. Things one might only acquire in a few select places around the world. And I don’t think he’ll be able to stop liking these things, or acquiring them, ever. I think he can be found that way.”

Krendler scoffs, looks smug, leans back on the chair again. She’s losing him. She can’t lose him. She’s so close.

“That’s hardly original, Starling. That’s how Mason Verger tracked Lecter down in Florence.”

She starts, tries to not let it show. She hadn’t known that. She didn’t know how _anyone_ did, what with Lecter killing Verger not long after arriving at Muskrat Farm. Something itches at her brain, but she loses her grip on it when she instead wonders how that reprehensible sadist had landed on the idea in the first place. Then she remembers that Dr. Alana Bloom had briefly been in his employ.

Ah.

She thinks she might need to talk to Dr. Bloom again. _And_ Margot Verger.

She focuses back on Krendler.

“With all due respect, sir, I think I can get further than Mason Verger did.”

He pretends to look thoughtful, considering, but she can tell he’s made up his mind. At least for now.

He smiles at her, and it’s so _ugly_.

“Very well. Very well _for now_. Don’t for a second presume to think you can relax. You find them, Starling. You find them, and then maybe we can talk about your future here.”

This time she can’t hold it back; she bares her teeth at him on her way out.

* * *

They go through the motions of her hearing, and she doesn’t get dismissed, and everyone is surprised except her and Krendler. It pains her to think that they are, however reluctantly, in league with each other. 

For now.

She goes home, and she wants to sleep off the jet lag, and she gets shouted at by a worried-sick Ardelia. She allows it all to run off her, and she tries to recalibrate, breathe, fill out the seams of herself, confidently inhabit the space of her own body. But her skin has shrunk, grown too small. 

She’s starting to fear it can no longer contain her.

Before bed she stands looking out of the window at the dark stag where it melds with the shadows in her yard. She wonders if its antlers could contain her, hold her aloft, high enough that she may see, everything she needs to see. 

Everything there is.

Then she goes to bed, but she doesn’t really sleep.

* * *

She gets to work, and nothing happens.

Nothing at all, and late winter gives way to early spring. No hits on truffles, or ludicrously expensive bottles of wine, or obscure, exclusive lotions and scents. She walks tiny little circles in the tiny little basement room that Krendler assigned her as a half-hearted insult, and she gets nowhere.

She had been reasonably sure of her strategy. Now she realises that, really, she’s got nothing, nothing at all apart from the knowledge that they are both alive. She doesn’t even know where in the world they are. She knows only that they are somewhere together. 

She’s got that, and she’s got the drive to find them both. When she sits in that dingy room late at night, washed out under artificial lights and avoiding going home to Ardelia, then she gets a little closer to examining her purpose for going after Lecter and Graham. When she’s hyped on caffeine and junk food and running entirely on fumes, then she can acknowledge that getting some justice for Jack Crawford isn’t the only reason she is doing this. There are other motives too, but they are half formed and vague in her subconscious, ink blots floating on water and she is waiting to see what shapes they take. What she can see in them.

What they will reveal.

And she catches herself longing back to Italy. All the time. She wonders if she’ll ever get to see Tuscany in summer, she wonders if Lecter and Graham are there, sauntering down the cobbled roads wearing crisp linen suits and wide brimmed hats. Admiring the architecture and drinking espressos in cafés in day, tucking into fillets and ribs and still beating hearts at night.

She must find them.

She ponders the possibility of doing something loud. Vulgar. Like taking a leaf out of Will Graham's own playbook, and have Freddie Lounds publish a garish spread on Tattle Crime. Lurid headlines and colour photos, fishing for a reaction or a misstep. But she dismisses it. At least for now. From everything she has gathered about Hannibal Lecter he dislikes vulgarity, brashness, tastelessness. _Rudeness_. She wants to catch him, yes, but she doesn’t necessarily want to get on his bad side at this stage in the game. 

And he doesn’t strike her as the kind of man that would ever set a foot wrong.

Unless of course it is on purpose.

So she mothballs that idea and contacts yet another tailor on Savile Row, talks to silk merchants and purveyors of rare art.

No purchases are made that can be connected to Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham.

* * *

“Get him back on the Most Wanted list,” she tells Krendler at one of their irregular meetings. They exist only so Krendler can berate her for lack of progress and unsubtly threaten to end her career, and Clarice hates them. “Put Graham on it too.”

Krendler sneers and pushes papers around, a sure sign that she is about to be dismissed. “As far as we know, Will Graham hasn’t done anything to warrant entry on the list, Starling. He’s disappeared, presumed dead. That doesn’t make him a fugitive.”

She persists.

“Add him to Hannibal’s entry. Put as many high definition photos on it as you can, be as descriptive as possible about Lecter and his crimes, then add on “presumed to be in the company of Will Graham”. Shake things up a little. Give some interviews. Talk about new leads. Hell, throw a press conference.”

She gets his attention then. Krendler does so love a good, dramatic press conference. Spotlight. Cameras. Her lip curls, and Krender sees it.

“How can I talk about new leads when you have precisely none, Starling?”

She doesn’t even try to hide the contempt in the look she gives him. She’s found out more than any of the rest of them, except perhaps Will Graham. And Graham...well.

“Not entirely true, Mr Krendler. We know that they are alive, and we know that they are together. I leave it up to you to spin exactly how it is that we know this.

* * *

So Krendler throws his press conference, bathing in the lights and the questions. Clarice stands out to the very far right of the podium, and she says nothing, and she doesn’t break eye contact with the cameras once. 

Not once.

* * *

And then Clarice gets a call. 

It’s from Chambers Street wine merchant in New York, and they’ve sold a bottle of one of the wines she has an alert out for. A Roumier 2002 Chambolle Musigny 1er Cru Amoureuses, bottles of which Hannibal Lecter had been known to serve, to personally uncork and pour, for his guests at his most exclusive dinners.

She asks for the security footage, and pours over it as soon as it’s emailed across. Impossible to see the face of the purchaser. A large, bulky coat and a hat denies both the camera and her a good look of body build and facial features. Body language gives nothing away.

She calls the shop, speaks to the attendant. For such an expensive bottle of wine he remembers very little, is unsure of eye colour, stature, dialect, weight.

She sighs and gets in her car. It’ll be nothing, there is no way Lecter and Graham will be so close by. It’ll will be a trail leading nowhere, but she needs to do something with herself. She’s a creature of decisive action, a being of fight or flight, and she’s been cooped up the the cage of a basement room for too long, held in stasis and frustration. A fruitless drive to New York will still be a change of scenery, will give the illusion of action and air. 

Once there she interviews the store attendant face to face, but he remembers nothing new. A man had come in to purchase the bottle of wine. It had been retrieved for him from the high value section kept locked up out back, he had paid for it, and left. 

What did this man look like? 

Not too tall, quite slim. Maybe brown eyes? Maybe green?

Clarice shifts on her feet, impatient and something like an itch in her limbs, an inability to stand still coursing through her, frustration and everything always that little bit out of reach.

Hair colour? Beard? No beard? 

The attendant shrugs and Clarice resists the urge to slap the man for being so unobservant, uncaring.

Over the shoulder of the clerk she sees the stag walking down a narrow aisle towards her, flanked by expensive vintages. It moves with a different purpose, she notes, fast and sure, head raised high and the eye contact with her absolute. Unflinching. 

On her way back out to the car she brings up the surveillance video on her phone, studies it again. Nothing jumps out at her, but she feels the stag’s muzzle on the back of her neck. Soothing her. Riling her. Moving her hair, brushing her ear.

Sending electricity coursing down her cells, her blood stream, igniting her, oh, what is this clinging to her atoms?

She turns to face the stag. She meets its eyes, so close, so close she can feel its breath across her cheeks and forehead and they take a step towards each other at the same time, step _into_ each other. She can smell it, and see the feathers and the scales so near, and all the yellow cabs and noise and people die away as she stands there on the pavement, so small and the stag so large. She raises her hand to _finally_ touch it, run her hand along its tines, and it slowly lowers its head to let her. 

And so she doesn’t hear the approach. She doesn’t see or sense anything. She feels only a sharp sting in her neck, like a spider bite, like a kiss with fangs.

Then everything goes black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm Swedish, and it goes without saying that my knowledge of the procedures of the FBI and Department of Justice are pretty much non-existent/gleaned from tv and movies. I could research it all properly, but then I'd inevitably get distracted, tumble down about 15 rabbits holes and never actually write anything at all. So...if you come across anything jarring, just suspend your disbelief, pretty please with a cherry on top? We're about to leave the FBI and law enforcement and the real world behind anyway.


	3. the darkness of dusk

* * *

**Chapter 3: the darkness of dusk**

* * *

Her hearing returns to her first. It reaches her far ahead of smell or sight or speech or the ability to move. 

At first she thinks that she is dead. That perhaps this is truly what the afterlife is like; buried alive in darkness, deprived of all senses, all movement - but not thoughts. 

And oh her _thoughts._ Vicious, snarled things, animals caught in steel-jawed traps, chewing off their own legs to escape; unbearable, impossible to look at. Full of lament and claustrophobia. And right now it’s all she’s got.

That leads her to wonder if this is the Hell she has never believed in. If she’s to be held in this dark, empty limbo for all time, _aware_ , but unable to do anything about it; feel or touch or talk. Locked in, but fully cognisant. 

Suddenly, absurdly, she recalls sitting in the evidence rooms at Quantico, going through the boxes of Hannibal Lecter’s notes and drawings recovered from Florence. At first she can’t understand why, but then she sees, like high contrast Polaroids in front of her, his work on Dante. The Divine Comedy. Heaven and Hell. 

Ah. 

She tries to remember all of Dante’s circles, tries to identify which one she might be trapped in, but the knowledge glides away from her, elusive and taunting and turning to smoke between her fingers. No matter, she thinks, it doesn’t matter now.

Then, with the suddenness and violence of a gunshot, her hearing comes back, and she recoils inside herself. It’s a gift with strings, with _barbs_.

She can hear her own breaths, but she doesn’t know if it means that she is in fact alive. Perhaps here _,_ in this underworld _,_ one is fooled into thinking that bodily functions still exist, that blood rushes with heartbeats and oxygen and the surety of life.

It takes her a little while to realise that it is two sets of breaths she can hear. Her own, _near,_ inside her. Deep and worryingly far between. And someone else’s. Close by, but _outside_ ; not in her head.

In the absence of anything else tangible, Clarice clings to this breathing done by someone else. She can’t move, can’t see or feel or smell, but these breaths prove that there exists something outside of her. That she might still be alive, that she isn’t forever trapped in a claustrophobic hinterland between the living and the dead. She uses the sound of someone’s lungs inhaling and exhaling air as a rope, slippery and frayed and treacherous, that she can use to pull herself towards cognisance and sanity.

It takes a long time. She would scream, but she hasn’t the ability to vocalise. She can only howl inside her own head as she clambers and pulls and reaches reaches _reaches_ towards this proof of a life outside of her own, towards what she is convinced is another living person. Fear and impotence hunts her, snaps at her heels, and she can’t run, not even inside her own head. 

Then she feels something brushing her nape, just once, and she senses the presence of something large behind her in the dark. 

The stag. It walks up alongside her and she strains towards it to put a hand on its flank but she can’t quite get there, the beast is just at the end of her fingertips. But it’s enough to know that it’s here with her, near.

And so she makes steadfast progress, stubborn, bullheaded. She brings her identity about herself like a blanket, a protective cloak. She’s an agent of the FBI. She knows she is inherently capable, she knows she is brave. She tracked down Jame Gumb single handedly, she had fought him in his pitch black basement of horror and she won. The darkness around her now is as impenetrable as Gumb’s basement had been, but she can defeat this too, she knows she can. 

She follows the breaths as if they are breadcrumbs, follows the winding path not further into the forest, but back to herself. She wonders how long time she has spent trapped in this peculiar, surreal purgatory, fighting to break through. Is it minutes or hours or days?

It feels like years. 

The stag is walking just ahead of her now, she can almost see it, dark in darkness. Solemn and steady and perhaps malevolent, perhaps not, but she follows it just as much as the breaths.

Then, suddenly…she feels how the beast disappears and she can open her eyes.

Vision isn’t immediate, and then it’s just a kaleidoscope of shadows and light, like sun dapples in wild motion, whirling out of control. But the movements gentle after a while. They gentle, and form into a ceiling. Ornate, and high above her where she lies, with roses and intricate woodwork in a warm nuance. Cherry, she thinks inconsequently. Cherry wood.

Then she tries to move. She can’t turn her entire body, at least not yet, but she can turn her head to the side, just a little, in the direction of the breaths that had led her back to herself. She lands on a face, pale, with eyes that catches light in different ways.

Will Graham. 

Looking relaxed but alert, reclining in an oxblood Chesterfield, his hair swept back and to the side, his beard trimmed neat, his eyes calmly meeting hers. There is a hint of softness to his mouth, to the pronounced but delicate curve of his upper lip, in contrast to a darkness in his eyes that owes nothing to the colour of his irises.

He looks kind, but he looks dangerous too.

There is a scar on the side of his face, ugly and jagged and shiny, that had not been present in any of the photos she’s seen of Graham. 

The first words out of her mouth are husky and unplanned, not at all what she had meant to say.

“You’re not wearing your glasses.”

There is the slightest curl of a smile on his lips as he leans forward a little bit in the chair. 

“I don’t actually need them. Never did. My vision is fine.” 

His voice is as she remembers it from the lecture videos, interrogation tapes, the phone call, but somewhat smoother. More even; stronger.

“You wore them to protect yourself from people.”

He nods.

“That’s right.” 

“You’re not wearing them here, with me.” 

He smiles, a real smile, she thinks, with the corner of his eyes crinkling and a quick flash of teeth and it warms up his entire face, he looks _boyish_ and she knows she mustn’t trust it.

“That’s because I don’t need to protect myself from you, Agent Starling. Not really.” 

Neither of them mention the word _captive_ , because it is written starkly on the air between them and there is no need. Will Graham has very much changed, realises Clarice, and she wishes he would give her even the slightest hint, some kind of reassurance, that her life isn’t in immediate danger. And more of her wakes from forced slumber, starts functioning, looking for ways to survive.

“Call me Clarice,” she says. 

“Did you dream?” he answers. “Just now. Did you dream?”

“No,” she says, but then thinks that perhaps it _was_ a dream, this notion that her body was her coffin and she trapped inside it. Perhaps it was a dream and not reality. 

“What did you give me?” she asks, voice a little stronger as more and more returns to her. Little sharp pieces of memory, falling from her hands and forming into an incomplete jigsaw by her feet, as vivid and as impenetrable as an oil spill. Standing on that busy New York street, surrounded by cars and cold spring rain and rushing people, reaching up, about to touch the stag for the very first time. 

The sting in her neck, sharp and quick. 

Will leans back in his chair again, never lets go of her with his eyes.

“It was quite the cocktail, I’m afraid, though I am unsure of the specifics of it. Ketamine. Other opiates, too.”

And _that,_ she thinks, explains rather a lot.

She shakes more confusion and delirium out of her hair, and takes in more of her surroundings than just Will Graham’s face. He stays quiet, head at a slight tilt, a finger on his upper lip.

And she, she continues to return to herself. It’s a relief to feel her identity trickle back inside her in fits and starts. The horrors of her nightmares or hallucinations slowly recede, a low, disconcerting hum in the background but no longer ruling her. She starts observing, cataloguing.

Surviving.

Will Graham seems content to let herself take her time, sits easily and studies her as she takes stock.

The room she is in is quite small but unmistakably opulent. Much of the walls are covered with heavy drapes, but what she can see of them is as beautifully carved and ornate as the ceiling. The drapes, of a deep green velvet, go from floor to ceiling, and she is fairly certain there are no windows behind them. As for other potential routes of escape, there are two doors. One, she suspects, leads to a bathroom. The other must therefore lead out of the room. It looks heavy and thick, she notes despondently. Oak, and with a locking contraption contrasting harshly against the older, fluid lines of the rest of the interior. It looks modern and terribly efficient. And it clearly locks on the outside.

 _Shit,_ she thinks.

With quite some effort she moves herself into a sitting position against the pillows. Will doesn’t offer to help her, no doubt realising that she would hardly welcome his touch. She looks down on herself, and realises with some relief that she is still wearing the same clothes as she did when she interviewed the sales attendant in the wine store.

She’s on a queen sized bed and the sheets are of silk. Apart from the bed and the Chesterfield in which Will Graham reclines there is a small desk of a fine wood she can’t name, and a cupboard that can only be referred to as a fucking _armoire_ , not a wardrobe or closet or anything as middling. Heavy and beautifully decorated with hand painted flowers, it stands on curved legs, and she knows with quite some certainty that there will be no magical land of escape at the back of it. 

More importantly, at first glance she sees absolutely nothing that might be used as a weapon or a tool with which to escape. Not that she is surprised.

She turns back to Will.

“I’m not in New York anymore, am I?” 

Will Graham smiles again. She wonders if he is trying to soothe her, calm her.

It’s not working.

“No. No you are not. New York was yesterday. Today is…today.” 

He doesn’t elaborate, and she doesn't expect him to. She is surprised he even gave her as much as a sense of time, that he didn’t allow her to drift quite as unmoored as he no doubt could. 

She gives him another appraisal. He is a slight man, not very tall, and she is in good shape. She wonders if she could overpower him.

“I wouldn’t,” he says softly, but his eyes flash with that darkness again, something she can’t name. “I really wouldn’t try.”

She sits further up against the headboard and wraps her arms about herself, even though the cold she feels is hardly external but rather one seeping from deep within her bones.

Not force, she thinks, no, not force. Her mind will have to be her only weapon then, at least for now.

But her mind is so very tired and confused. 

“Tell me about the stag,” Will says.

She considers, and she remembers his reaction when she mentioned the beast over the phone. Shock. _Recognition_. She decides that she’s got nothing to lose by telling him.

“I see it everywhere. It follows me. Came to Italy with me. Just before you...you _caught_ me I was about to touch it for the first time.” She breaks off, realises now when she’s talking more how hard it is to make the words obey her. How tricky it is to bring her memories to heel. She wonders how long it will take until the drugs leave her system. She can’t stand feeling this vague. This helpless.

“What does this creature look like?” asks Will, but she gets the sense that he isn’t really wondering, that he...that he already knows. That it isn’t a question as much as a need for...for _confirmation_. 

She shivers, and realises that no amount of opiates can blur the picture of the stag in her mind’s eye, that it exists with the sharpest lines and most vivid colours in her memory and probably always will.

“Large. Dark. Almost black. Feathers along its neck, it’s legs and hind. And scales. It’s…” She hesitates, then carries on. “It’s beautiful.”

“Scales?” Will asks, something sharpening in his seated stance, something making his gaze keen and razor edged.

“Yes,” she answers, and she can feel how she is slumping a little as if in response to the tightening of Will. How she tires already even though there are so many questions yet to ask, so much to find out, so many obstacles to overcome. She shakes her head, tries to clear it. “Yes,” she says again. “Scales all along its sides. Like fish scales, you know? Black. They...they shimmer and glisten when it moves. Catches the light.”

Will looks like he understands, and like he won’t tell her what it is he knows. She holds onto his voice, how it still sounds kind even though his eyes are hard like flint.

“I see.”

She wonders exactly what it is he realises, and why she feels so shut out from it.

“You’ve seen it too, haven’t you?” 

She hates how weak her own voice is becoming, how her eyelids droop and her chin falls towards her chest. But she refuses to slip away, keeps her eyes trained on Will, because this is important, she knows it is. 

Will says nothing though, just meets her eyes squarely and maybe he hides things that way, maybe he tucks things away in plain sight, maybe he’s learnt _how_. 

She knows he knows. Knows what the creature means, what it portends.

She only wishes that _she_ did. 

Will Graham had never mentioned a stag. Not in any interrogations or debriefs or casual conversations that she had been able to find records of. She knows because she checked, thoroughly, after she herself started to see the creature. But it’s a hallucination. He might have mentioned recurring hallucinations to his psychiatrist.

Of course, Dr. Hannibal Lecter burned all his notes before he fled to Florence.

“We share this,” she murmurs, her voice beginning to sound wispy, beginning to weaken. She suspects she won’t be able to keep herself awake for much longer. “Isn’t that peculiar, Mr Graham? I’ve never experienced hallucinations or visions before. Now I see what you saw. I know I do.”

Will doesn’t acknowledge her assertion, her _conviction_. Instead he nods towards the bedside table standing between them, and slides forward in the armchair, prepares to leave. 

“There’s water. I doubt you’re hungry just yet, but you'll get something to eat later. For now I think you should sleep a bit more.”

She eyes the crystal glass dripping with condensation and resolves to get her drinking water straight from the bathroom tap. She needs to get the drugs out of her system, not take in more. Then she realises that Will has stood up, that he is halfway across the floor on his way towards the door. She realises that she doesn’t want Will Graham to leave, that she’d rather be with the the unknown quantity of him than sit here alone and locked in. 

“You know, I envy your empathy. The way you rescued people. Saved people. I want that for myself. I want to be able to do that.”

If Will reacts to her use of past tense she doesn’t notice it. But he does look pained when he meets her eyes over his shoulder, just a flickering second of rawness, of something that she thinks might be really _him._

“The cost is undescribable,” he answers, voice all sharp edges and hurt. “To always _see._ ”

The way he puts emphasis on the last word smatters goosebumps across her arms, and she wonders about all the things she doesn’t know about Will Graham.

“You’re with him, aren’t you? You’re with Hannibal Lecter.”

Will turns around then, walks back to the Chesterfield and sits down again. She keeps talking, even though it’s a struggle, because she can’t stand the thought of being left on her own.

“I thought I could find him the same way Mason Verger did.”

She’s slurring now, and she realises that she’s sliding back down onto the bed, that she’ll have maybe a minute or two before she’s unconscious again. 

Will smiles a little, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“You made one miscalculation, Clarice. Back then, Hannibal _wanted_ to be found. Now, he does not. _We_ do not.”

He leans back a little in the chair, steeples his fingers under his chin, and Clarice thinks that for all his new stillness and surety, he does that to keep his fingers still and busy. To keep from _twitching_.

“But you started digging, and we didn’t want that. I remembered things about you. Jack spoke highly of you. You caught the Buffalo Bill killer back when you were still a trainee. I thought that you might actually succeed in finding us. So did Hannibal. And we didn’t manage to warn you off. So we decided to nip this in the bud before you could cause us true damage.”

She brings her knees up against her chest even as she recognises this as defensive, scared gesture. She can’t stop herself. 

“Why didn’t you just kill me?” 

He smiles then, and it is the first things that he’s done that truly chills Clarice. It’s a wide smile, all teeth, but it absolutely does not reach his eyes. 

“I didn’t want to. I’m... _curious._ ”

His gaze is so incredibly steady, no looking away, no breaking eye contact, and it’s the last thing she sees before she is finally forced to close her own. His voice follows her deep into sleep. 

“And so is Hannibal.”

* * *


	4. five past midnight

**  
Chapter 4: five past midnight**

* * *

When Clarice wakes again she’s alone.

She climbs out of bed as soon as she opens her eyes, even though her head is spinning wildly, her thoughts at an odd tilt, askew and difficult to grasp. Her mouth is dry and her limbs won’t quite work as they should, jerking and shaking at odd times.

But she gets out of bed because she doesn’t know how long she’ll be left alone. How much time she has.

The crystal glass of water that had stood on the bedside table is gone now, so she heads for the bathroom first. Fine marble and gilded taps, a deep roll top bath on lion feet, but no mirrors, no shower screen; no glass that she can break and use as a weapon.

No lock on the door.

She quickly uses the toilet, then drinks deep and long from the tap, the thirst a living, curling pain in her throat and chest. She splashes cool water over her face, then lets it run over her wrists whilst leaning heavily against the sink. Clearer, her mind is _clearer_ , but still not where it ought to be. She abhors this handicap, this feeling of helplessness, the fury at having her greatest weapon running at reduced capacity.

She investigates the bedroom.

She pulls all the drapes first. Luxurious and soft under her fingers, a liquidity to the material she’s never felt before. But, as she had thought, they reveal only wall beneath. No windows, and she is too distracted to appreciate the fine and intricate woodwork exposed.

The bed she is familiar with, frame heavy and baroque, the bedside table simple and without drawers. No convenient, solid lamp perched on top with which she might bludgeon her captors and escape. Instead there is a copper light fixture carefully screwed into the wall just above the headboard of the bed. 

There’s the chesterfield, and the sleek wooden desk with empty drawers and another light screwed into the wall above it. The beautiful armoire, empty but for a few simple items. Couple of pairs of lounge pants, some tops. All, as far as she can tell, of silk and cashmere. No hangers.

She doesn’t get changed, even though her clothes reek of fear and confusion. She could do with a bath too, her hair lank and her skin covered in a layer of cold sweat.

But no way, she thinks. No way.

She studies the door out of the room. Oaken, and unmistakably solid and thick. Locks on the outside, as she had thought, just a smooth, impenetrable expanse of wood where the handle should be.

There is nothing else in here, certainly nothing she could use. It has been carefully gone over to ensure no escape, no impromptu fashioning of weapons.

It’s almost like they, or at least Hannibal, have done this before, she thinks with the bleakest of gallows humour. 

She tries to take stock of her situation, but it’s still tricky, her thoughts gliding through her fingers like so much gossamer. All she can think is that she got too close. They had both tried to warn her away, then she had stood with her chin raised at Paul Krendler’s press conference, eye contact with the cameras absolute and unflinching, and she had willed them to act. 

And act they had.

 _Get too close to the devil and you will get burned_ , she thinks with something skirting the edges of hysteria.

And she wonders where, exactly, Will Graham belongs in this pantheon of Hannibal’s.

Then she returns to the bathroom and sits on the floor with her back against the closed door. A flimsy, threadbare illusion of privacy and safety, perhaps, but one she will take.

That’s where Will finds her.

“Clarice?”

She jerks at the sound of his voice coming from the other side of the bathroom door. She hadn’t heard him enter the bedroom, halfway lost in her own mind, in lament of her own situation. She will need to be better, she thinks, more aware. 

Prepared.

She stands, because she doesn’t want Will to tower above her, and she opens the bathroom door before he does because she wants to hold onto whatever agency she can.

However pathetic. 

“Hello”, Will says with a slight smile. He’s standing in the middle of the room, giving her lots of space, keeping his distance from her, trying to make her feel safe.

He’s poised to strike should she try anything. She can see it.

She doesn’t return his smile, but take a couple of steps into the room before stopping, 

“How long did I sleep this time?”

They both know that she is grasping for a sense of time, but only Will knows how much of it will be deprived her. 

Time. The movement of seconds and hours and days, daylight and moonlight. 

Space. Distances, containment, deprivement. 

“For a while,” says Will carefully. 

She knows she will need to play along, do the right things. She will never get out of here otherwise. 

“I see,” she says, and stays where she is. Waits for some kind of cue from him, studies him for signs and ticks and giveaways. But he is so still now, and she just can’t reconcile him with the man from the old video recordings of lectures and interrogations. But she will have to, and fast, or her situation will be even more precarious. She will need to learn how to read the Will Graham that he is now.

A peculiar amalgam of old and new, because she can see softness in him, here, now, she _can_ , she knows she can.

Eventually Will takes pity.

“I brought you something to eat,” he says and gestures behind him, towards the desk.

As he says it she can smell the food, and hunger is a living thing just then, a clawed and fanged little animal tearing at her guts. The tap water she gulped down has done nothing for her empty stomach. She tries to think of how long since she’s eaten. A hasty canteen croissant in the morning before she travelled from Quantico to New York, but she doesn’t know how many days and miles lie between then and now.

She walks a generous half circle around Will and looks at the food on the desk. It’s presented on a silver tray. A bowl of soup, richly steaming and smelling wildly delicious. Couple of hunks of bread, freshly baked by the looks of it, yellow butter melting into the surface.

There is quiet but clear humour in Will’s voice as he assures her:

“Vegetable soup. No meat.”

He has turned with her, careful to ensure she’s got him in her eye line. A kindness, she knows, he's showing her a kindness. He’s as careful and studied as if she’s a skittish wild animal, gentle in his movements, soft in his voice. Trying not to startle her.

But she can see how keenly he studies her. How aware of her he is. If she tried anything she wouldn’t get far.

He’d see to it.

“Anything else in the soup?” she asks archly, with a chutzpah she’s not quite feeling.

“No,” Will says, and she doesn’t believe him. 

But, the choice is drugs or starvation, and she thinks she will be less effective starved than she would be drugged. So she pulls out the chair, sits down, picks up the spoon and brings a mouthful of soup to her lips.

It is gorgeous. It seems the stories of Hannibal’s prowess as a chef hasn’t been exaggerated.

She eats more, tries some of the bread too. Just as good. 

Once Will sees she’s eating he sits down in the armchair. Makes himself comfortable. For a while there is only silence as she eats, but to her surprise it’s not uncomfortable. Rather, it’s relaxing, and she realises that she is resting against his breaths, leaning on them, as she had when she found her way back from unconsciousness and delusions. She’s using the breaths of Will Graham to _soothe_ herself, and that’s terrifying. 

So soon…

She shakes her head angrily, sits up straighter. 

Will easily picks up on her mood, her thoughts. What chance will she ever have against him?

“You have looked around, realised there is no escape.” It’s not a question, but his voice is soft, oddly compassionate. As if he knows what she’s going through, as if he didn't go with Hannibal of his own free will.

She doesn’t want to talk with Will about her possibilities of escape.

“I spoke with Alana Bloom,” she says, hoping that mentioning old friends might bring Will to memories of who he used to be.

“Ah,” says Will. ”How is Alana?”

“Not very forthcoming.”

He nods, just a fast, sharp jerk of his chin, and suddenly, just for a fraction of a second, she sees the old Will. 

“I’m not surprised. She gave her life to Hannibal. He always collects.”

Her mouth goes dry, and she stops eating.

“And...and you’ll let him?”

He’s still again, back to who he is now. 

“In so far as I am able, I hope to divert his attention.”

Will’s voice is calm, unruffled.

“And I tried to talk to Bedelia du Maurier,” Clarice says, a creeping horror settling thick on her tongue, making it hard to form words, “but I couldn’t find her.”

“Hannibal ate her.”

Everything she knows tilts sharply sideways, all air leaves the room. She had suspected as much, of course she had, but to have it placidly confirmed by this kind-faced man with his darkness around the edges and his colour shifting eyes…

“Did...did you partake in the meal?”

Will maintains absolute eye contact, unflinching, unapologetic.

“It was several meals, actually. And no, I didn’t, although Bedelia did, for as long as she was able.” 

He pauses, considers her. 

“Hannibal and I have reached a...compromise, of sorts, where my active participation is concerned.”

He chuckles a little, as if he just said something incredibly funny, but she doesn’t understand the joke. She’s stopped eating, all appetite lost.

He realises, shuffles forward a little bit in the chair, makes to stand.

“You’re tired. You have a lot to take in. Have a bath, Clarice. Get changed. You will feel better for it. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

And he stands and starts for the door, but she calls out for him. 

“Will?”

Just like last time she is preventing him from leaving.

When he turns back to her he looks like he knows exactly what she is doing. Of course he knows, she thinks. Of course. She speaks anyway, even though maybe she speaks straight into his hands.

“I want you to promise me something.”

Will shakes his head.

“Promises are precarious and slippery things, Clarice. But I will do what you ask if it is at all within my means to do so.”

She takes a deep breath.

“I appreciate that no ordinary rules apply here. I’m...I’m your captive. At your mercy. But I _do_ want you to promise me one thing, Will. I want you to promise me that Dr Hannibal Lecter won’t do to me what he did to Miriam Lass. To you. No shock therapies, no light therapy, no fucking psychic driving.”

She stands too, faces him from across the room, even walks a little closer to him. He’s taller than her, she notes, with about half a head.

“Whatever happens, I want to keep my own mind. Please, Will. Promise me.”

He studies her for a long time, and his gaze slips inside her, becomes something so terribly intimate; dipping into her veins, sliding along her bones. Too much to bear, entirely too much. 

Then he nods. 

“I’ll talk to him.”

And he opens the door, steps outside, and she can hear the lock turn.

It had been unlocked the entire time he’d been with her. 

* * *

She is asleep when he comes to her the first time. 

Not ready. Not prepared. 

Nothing could prepare her.

She thinks perhaps it is the footfalls that give it away. They have nothing of the slight shuffle that she’s already begun to associate with Will Graham.

These are sure and fast and steady.

Deadly.

Enough to wake her, and she sits up in bed when she hears the steps stop outside her door.

The door unlocks, opens, and he steps inside.

She sits up straighter on her bed, studies him quietly just as he studies her. Out of sight her fingers are twisting and pulling at the cover. Twining and rolling, over and over.

He’s a big man, enormous and taut, yet graceful of movement. Fluid and certain, a riptide in his wake. Sharp features, timeless, something primordial in them, his gaze as cold as glacier lakes, as vacuum in outer space. 

She does not understand how he could fool so many for so long. The man standing in front of her is so clearly _other_. A predator. It is brimming over in his eyes, this curious monstrosity swimming in maroon.

She’s terrified. She’s enraptured too.

“Hello, Agent Starling.” He turns to indicate the chesterfield behind him. ‘May I sit?”

“Of course,” she answers, because what else can she say? 

He sits down, crosses his legs and clasps his hands on his knees. He’s wearing dark slacks and an expensive looking roll neck jumper in mauve. His hair is longer and darker than the photos she’d seen of him from prison, but like Will he hasn’t altered his appearance in any significant ways.

Confident, she thinks. _Fuck_.

“First of all, please accept my condolences. I understand you and Jack Crawford were close.”

“You tried to kill Jack,” she can’t help but answer, even though she knows she ought to acknowledge his courtesy.

“More than once,” he agrees.

“Thank you for the flowers,” she says, and notes just the tiniest twitch of his lip at her abrupt change of subject.

“You are very welcome.” Then: “What did you think of Florence?”

“I loved it,” she says honestly. “I would have liked to stay for longer.”

He inclines his head.

“It is indeed one of the most resplendent cities in all the world. I miss it.”

“Do you think you might go back one day?” she asks, playing at guilenesses, hoping to cause just a pinprick of hurt.

He sees through it immediately.

“I don’t know, Agent Starling. Do you think _you_ might?”

Touché, she thinks, and falls silent. He’s quiet too, and she resists the urge to squirm under his gaze. Tries to breathe deeply and stay calm as he takes her in.

She has bathed, and changed into the light grey silk and cashmere provided, the material like sinister whispers against her skin. Somewhere between there and here she lost her hair tie and so is having to wear her long hair loose over her shoulders. She can’t see herself, but she knows she doesn’t look like Clarice. She’s some other creature here, van and unsubstantial, forced to walk a labyrinth she can’t even see.

“You are not as I had imagined,” she tells him.

He steeples his fingers under his chin. 

“What then, had you imagined?”

“Something more tightly held. Restrained.”

He smiles, and it’s terrifying in its sharp nakedness, bare and cold, enamel and fangs.

“You forget, Agent Starling, that I no longer have to pretend. No more artifice.”

Ah. She needs movement from his fine threat, and stands from the bed. She moves a little too fast though, and has to cling to the bedpost against an insidious sort of vertigo.

He says nothing as she shakes it off, the nausea and the floor roiling under her feet. With some effort she walks over to the desk, leans back against it. Tries to ground herself to the solid wood, use it to anchor her fear, her fascination.

“Are you drugging me, Doctor Lecter?”

“No,” he says without any hesitation, and she is almost certain that he lies.

“Will you kill me?” she asks next, and is angry with herself for failing to quite hide the waver in her voice. Hannibal smiles a little, just a twitch to one side of the mouth.

”I would rather not. I fear that would upset Will, perhaps even distress him. And wherever feasible I endeavour not to upset or distress Will. Besides which, you are quite fascinating in your own right, Agent Starling. I’ve followed your exploits since Will first brought you to my attention. You remind me, as you no doubt reminded Jack Crawford, of Miriam Lass. Though you burn brighter than her, with that fire in your hair and in your belly, with your single minded need for goodness and justice and light at war with the darkness leaking from your mind Yes, Agent Starling, I see it. I can practically taste it.” 

He stills, and flicks his tongue out as if he’s sampling her darkness on the air between them, and all the shadows in the room are sucked into his eyes. 

“With that, you also remind me of Will. But you do not burn brighter than him, I don’t think, just differently. Your elemental alchemy weaves peculiar paths. Will, he walks on dark water. You walk on flames.”

Her throat is dry, and she feels unmoored when falling into his eyes. Like this, sucked into the placid monstrosity of him, she could almost forget that she is a captive, trapped in this opulent room with its rich colours and windowless walls.

She must never forget.

She stays still as Hannibal stands again, inclines his head at her in farewell.

“I disturbed your sleep, Agent Starling. Please do accept my apologies. I will let you get back to it now, and we will converse more soon.”

When he’s almost at the door she speaks again.

“And you, Doctor Lecter? What are you?” 

He stops and looks at her over his shoulder, his hair falling into his eyes and his bare teeth morphing into a smile like a scalpel.

“Oh I assure you, Agent Starling. I am just me.” He continues to the door, opens it, pauses one final time. “And please, do call me Hannibal.”

She tries to dig her nails into the wood underneath her, and she wonders how long he will allow her attempts to play these captivity games.

“Then you must call me Clarice.”

He inclines his head, so polite, such a gentleman, before shutting the door behind him.

She listens to the lock clicking shut.

Not for long, she doesn’t think.


	5. witching hour

* * *

**Chapter 5: witching hour **

* * *

She thinks that a few days go by.

Four. Maybe five. Six?

She can measure time only in the arrivals of Will Graham, and in the spurious day-rhythm she creates for herself. 

When she turns off the lights it’s night. When she turns them back on it’s day. 

She tries to tailor it to the meals Will brings her, tries to ensure that the mornings she creates for herself match up with homemade granola and warm bread and thyme honey. She isn’t always successful. She can wake from fitful, broken sleep convinced it’s morning, only to be served ragù.

She won’t eat that.

It turns out that the vegetable soup served as her first meal here had been a soft start, for all the meals brought to her now, excepting breakfast, contain meat. Delicious looking, voluptuous dishes, brimming with colour and textures, aromas to make her whine deep in her throat.

And presented on enamel plates with plastic cutlery because Will Graham, it appears, is not a fool.

She eats around the meat. The vegetables, the breads, the fruit and the dairy. Not nearly enough to sate her, the meat always determinedly the largest part of the meal.

Sleep is another thing, a fickle thing, elusive and tempestuous. She’s never sure if she actually sleeps or just hovers in a dusky hinterland somewhere between awareness and fitful unconsciousness. And sleep deprivation is wretched, she thinks as she lies flat on her back on the bed studying the pretty ceiling, because she can’t properly grasp her thoughts. They are slippery, unwilling to conform, rebellious and unbodied. It makes it hard to pull her strength about herself and make a proper plan.

And it’s astounding to her how _fast_ it goes, how quickly she loses all sense of time and place. And herself. She can’t see herself, and sometimes she has to pull up her sleeves and study the skin on her arms to ensure it’s not transparent.

Fuck, she thinks, she’s a FBI agent and in barely no time at all she’s been unmade, hungry and tired and halfway insane. So much for her training.

She assumes she is being looked for, that the FBI is searching high and low. But she also assumes she is very safely hidden. Lecter being something of an expert on the subject after all, she thinks with a sharp, uncomfortable mix of venom and despair.

She learns Will’s footsteps, can tell from a distance and through not-quite-slumber when his is the approach. His steps always stop outside the door; Lecter’s passes by. The fallen doctor hasn’t been to see her since that first time, and for now she is grateful for that.

Will’s visits are fast affairs now. He drops off her food and he takes away empty trays and he keeps interaction to a minimum, and of course she knows what he’s doing, what _they_ are doing. They are playing an erasure game, they are leaving her in this place with no time and no space and soon entire brush strokes of her will be gone.

A painting in reverse, she is a painting in reverse

Will they remake her entirely, in lush egg tempera and with the light of the renaissance behind her? Or will she meld into shadows, a creature in a Caravaggio painting?

After a few of those visits she does exactly what he wants her to do, and initiates conversation. Anything to stave off boredom and terror, anything to pretend for a while that she’s not a prisoner. Forget that she knows exactly what is happening to her, that if things continue like this she’s helpless to do anything about it.

“I’m curious,” she says to his retreating back, stopping him at the very last second... and just like that it’s become a comfortable pattern, ”why exactly does he think I will eat the meat? Knowing what I know? What everyone knows?”

Will stops just as she had known he would, he turns to her and she relaxes when he looks at her. Gives her some of that deep solemn consideration and gentleness, and all of it so infused with shimmering darkness. Distantly she knows that she shouldn’t find relief in his attention, at least not _this early_. But in the absence of a mirror his gaze is the only thing to fill in her contours, make her in flesh and blood, and she will take that even if just for a minute.

He puts the tray down on the desk again, then sits, and she refuses to acknowledge the shiver of delight. Not when he acknowledges it for her, his eyes knowing and clear as he steeples his fingers under his chin. 

To keep from twitching.

 _Ah_.

She looks him over with slow, deliberate consideration, because she wants him to know that she is cataloguing him just as much as he is cataloguing her.

Though she’s pretty certain he is more successful.

“Hannibal takes great pleasure in the preparation of food,” Will says slowly, willing to indulge her now when she’s played straight into his hands and reached out.

“And the slaughter of it?” she asks with a bluntness she doesn’t quite feel.

“And the slaughter,” Will agrees.

Clarice decides to go a slightly different direction, and yet not.

“I found his other house.”

“I know,” says Will. “That’s when I really started to take note of you. No one else found that house. Not Jack. Not _me_.”

And look where it brought her. She should have been so much more careful, she thinks. So much more. 

“What happened there? With Francis Dolarhyde?”

Will just looks at her, and suddenly all she wants is to determine the colour of his eyes.

“I had planned to let Dolarhyde kill him. Went to some pains to get him to target Hannibal. I thought they could take each other out, and I could return to my wife.”

He leans back in the chair, sinks deeper into it.

“I convinced Jack of the set-up. I pushed it through, even though I knew nothing would come of it but bloodbaths and both Hannibal and Dolarhyde on the loose. I _knew_ that. But I still made it happen.”

He sighs, and he looks genuinely remorseful but also he does _not_. 

“We ended up at Hannibal’s house on the bluff. Had some wine. Then Dolarhyde came through the window. Injured Hannibal something terrible.”

He meets her eyes, square on, and he looks so certain and so uncertain as he touches the scar on his face.

“In the end I couldn’t let Dolarhyde do it. Hannibal and I took him down together. Ripped him to pieces. I… it was… it was _beautiful_.”

Will’s eyes are so wet and so dark, and she can’t quite bear it, wants to touch him but recoil too. His voice is clear and without guile, without apology, as he continues.

“I knew then that I was a monster too. So I threw us both from the cliff.”

The way he says it is so casual and so final, and Clarice’s head spins.

“I was there,” she whispers. “I stood looking down the bluff. How could you possibly have survived?”

“Exactly,” says Will quietly. “How _could_ we? Yet we did. I have no idea how. I can’t remember. It was Hannibal’s doing, I’m sure.”

Will stands from the chair, walks to the desk and picks the tray back up. Then stops in front of her, careful to maintain distance but closer than he’s ever been to her before.

“That’s when I stopped fighting it. That’s when I decided to stay with him.”

She says nothing, just meets his gaze, and she struggles to reconcile what he says with the softness around his eyes, the shimmer in them, but then she thinks of the Will Graham she has read about. The Will who had orchestrated the downfall of Hannibal Lecter first from inside prison, then from right by Lecter’s side. The coldness and the darkness of it, the willingness to sink deep inside and _merge_ , do unspeakable things just to win.

He had chased Hannibal Lecter to Italy and back, then finally seen him incarcerated. And then... now... 

She wants to ask what they are to each other, but finds that the question sticks to her tongue.

Will nods at her.

“I’ll see you.”

Then he leaves again, and she feels almost sad that she will have to hurt him to get out of here.

* * *

In a deviation from the rapidly establishing pattern, Lecter brings her next meal.

He unlocks the door and comes through with a tray, disturbing her bleak reverie on the bed. She stands quickly at his entry, unwilling to remain in such vulnerable position with Dr Lecter in the room.

He wears a plaid three piece suit, his hair is impeccable and he carries the tray with effortless elegance and sharp purpose. Nothing like that of Will Graham’s slight shuffle and rather more utilitarian approach to presentation. Indeed, Hannibal removes a silver cloche with a flourish, and she takes a couple of steps forward at the smell and the colours, even though she’s terrified by the large man’s presence. 

Reds and greens, vivid contrasts.

“Medallions of meat with lentilles verte du Puy and salsa verde,” he says and fuzzes with the silverware, with the deep red linen napkin. A proper knife and fork, not the utensils of plastic brought her by Will. She wonders if it’s because Will trusts her less, or because Lecter is just that more confident in his ability to keep her in check. Probably the latter, coupled with genuine distaste for plastic cutlery.

“It smells very good,” she says politely, because it really does. The meat is a blushing pink, cooked to medium rare, and the smell of herbs and broth is intoxicating.

Lecter finishes setting out the meal and turns to her fully.

“You don’t eat any of the meat I prepare for you.”

She’s surprised, startled really, by her own genuine laugh, even if it’s shrill and hurting her own ears.

“Can you blame me?”

Lecter ignores her question, rather like she thought he would.

“You are fading, Clarice. No sunshine, no fresh air.” He makes no mention of the coerced nature of this, and his part in her confinement. “A good and varied diet is imperative for your health.”

She wants to scoff at him and his manipulation, but he’s also got a point. She’s feeling faint, she struggles against confusion, and not all of that can be ascribed to the drugs she’s convinced are put in her food. She’s not getting enough nutrients, and she’s not getting enough exercise. She needs to remedy both.

Of course, that on its own is not enough to convince her to eat the meat offered her by Lecter. 

But much, much more importantly, just as with Will, she needs Hannibal to lower his guard if she’s to have any hope of getting out of here. She’ll need to play. She’ll _have_ to play.

How bad can it be? How bad can it get? 

She walks over and sits down by the desk and delicately spreads the red linen napkin over her lap. Maintaining eye contact with Lecter she picks up the fork and spears one of the tender medallions on it. Brings it to her mouth, bites down, chews carefully.

Swallows.

It’s delicious. 

She hopes it’s pork. 

Quite deliberately she allows some red juice from the meat to dribble down her chin, before dabbing it away with a corner of the napkin. Lecter looks enraptured, but he looks knowing too. She’s in no doubt that he sees through her skin and hair and bones straight into her brain, understands what she is doing, but she will simply have to keep going. Keep playing, keep trying. Wait for the right moment. He can’t keep vigilant all the time.

He can’t.

She takes another mouthful before speaking again. Begins the same way as with Will.

“I’m curious, Hannibal. Why are you doing this? You know, I’ve read the trial transcripts and Will’s debriefings and all other available material. You, you appear to be endlessly curious. You poke and you prod your subjects, you seem to think of humanity as something quite fascinating… yet you strike me as easily bored. Those of your kills that we know about have all been different. Elaborate, artistic. Gruesome, almost beautiful. And never the same. Why then repeat history by kidnapping a female protegee of Jack Crawford’s? Bit samey, don’t you think?”

Lecter straightens his slacks then sits down on the Chesterfield. There is nothing on his face other than a placid mask, but she thinks she sees amusement in the fine lines around his mouth.

”Miss Lass was an unexpected complication. I had to think on my feet. Of course, I did find a purpose for her. I weaved her into the tapestry of a greater plan, turned her into an alibi.”

And _how_ Jack Crawford and Frederick Chilton had suffered for that. 

“It’s different with you. You, you were planned. And, most crucially: not _my_ plan.”

Will’s then. 

He follows her, as intimate with her thoughts as if he is sliding his fingers on top of them, along every kink and knot, and she can’t fathom how someone so _other_ can understand the human mind so well. 

“Will, Will is not quite like me. When you became a threat, in the first instance he wanted to try and see a way to let you live. And I am loath to deny him anything.”

She eats another mouthful of meat, dipped in the salsa verde.

“Is that so?”

Lecter regards her thoughtfully, still, so terrifyingly _still_. She hates that about him, how he keeps himself so tightly reined that she can read nothing of him. Just a slippery outline that she can find no purchase on.

“Will told me that the two of you spoke about that night at my beach house. What happened. I brought Will there without any real idea of the outcome. I didn’t know whether I would kill Will, or be killed myself. But when I saw him calmly sip his wine and watch with curiosity how Mr Dolarhyde prepared to _change_ me, that’s when I knew I could never let him go.”

Hannibal pauses, for a second looks almost wry.

“For all his attempts to the contrary.”

She’s finished all her food.

He stands from the chair, collects the tray, nods at her and makes to leave the room. By the door, however, he pauses and turns to her. Absently she ponders his and Will’s willingness to give her their backs, but loses the train of thought when Hannibal speaks again.

“At this stage I am only guessing at Will’s _true_ reasons for keeping you. They are...good guesses, but guesses non the less. And, Clarice, at this very moment in time I do not share them. That being the case, believe me when I say that I will not hesitate to take...action should you in any way become a threat to mine and Will’s existence.”

Oh, she believes him. 

* * *

  
She had thought to let it go longer before she tried anything. Get Lecter and Will to, well, not _trust_ her, but at least lower their guards a modicum. Give her more of a head start.

But she can’t bear it. Can’t bear the confinement, the way her mind slips and slides, how her thoughts ricochet wildly. The way boredom is paired so disjointedly with terror, chafing her, hurting her.

It makes her act recklessly, and she _knows_ it’s reckless, she really does. It’s just that she is unable to stop herself, even though, objectively speaking, her plan is terrible. It’s not even a plan, she concedes as she stands with her back pressed against the wall next to the door; it’s a knee-jerk reaction. It’s nothing that reflects her training or usual cool mind, it’s something born out of deep disquiet and a primal conviction she’s about to be taken _down_. Instinctive fear, curled in her hind brain, buried notions left behind from generations before her, unthinking and unyielding. 

Instincts deep in her marrow.

She knows all this, but it means nothing.

She listens where she stands, and once again she considers the ease with which she has learnt the herald of Will Graham. His steps. How she knows them already, can tell his approach. How the way his feet move against the hard floor can make her feel anticipation, tarnished joy, expectation. Fear.

Yes, his steps, she knows his steps. They are coming for her now and he, with his smile and new hair and uneven soul, soon he will unlock and walk through.

She takes deep breaths as she stands there and waits for the door to open. She knows she can do this. She is not yet so weakened that she can’t fight and run.

When Will steps through she doesn’t allow herself to hesitate, not even for a second. She flies into motion so sharp and unhinged that she struggles to keep up with herself. Throws a punch with all her might towards the side of his face presented to her, the side with the scar. Impacts his temple with a force that reverberates through her elbow up to her shoulder, almost numbs her arm. It certainly bruises her knuckles, and Will goes down on his knees in a mess of utilitarian tableware, consommé and homemade dinner rolls. She bends, picks up the fallen tray and then brings it down hard over his head, sending him the rest of the way down to the floor in a wild sprawl.

She doesn’t check to see if he’s unconscious. She leaves the room and she runs.

Out into a long dark corridor flanked to one side by large windows, and she is faintly surprised to see the silhouettes of naked treetops in her peripheral. She had thought she was held in a basement, not a floor or two up. She sees light further ahead, and instinctively she shies away from it, spinning and running in the opposite direction. She ignores the chill in her bare feet, can focus only on finding a way out.

At the end of the hall she finds a narrow staircase with an abandoned, dusty smell about it, clearly not in much use. It creaks hideously as she rushes down two steps at a time, but she can think of nothing but how she’s clearly towards the back of this unknown house, how it’s hopefully less travelled. 

Downstairs her cold feet hit even colder marble, and she’s in yet another dark hallway, windowless this time. She darts into the first room she comes across, hoping for a door leading outside. 

It’s an office in shadow, heavy furniture just suggestions in the cold blue darkness, but she takes no notice of particulars. Her attention is stolen by a large window. She looks through it, and it brings her motion to a stop.

Winter. She’s attempting to escape in full winter, barefoot and in loungewear. In New York it had been early spring, cold rain and bitter winds. But here, wherever it is she has been brought… She takes in the vistas in front of her.

There is that peculiar silence of a snowy night, blanketed and peaceful. Unfair, out of place, she thinks over her beating heart, the rush of iron in her mouth. She stands before the floor to ceiling vaulted window, framed by velvet curtains and stares at all the snow. So much white, lit by a swollen waxing gibbous. And far away, yes, all the way over there: a dark treeline streaks like a black wound across the landscape.

If she runs in that direction she will be entirely unprotected, laid bare by snow and moon. Still she tries the window, finds it locked, and turns to hurry out of the room and continue down the hall. She rushes along and by now, when this much time has passed since her escape from her room, the silence is oppressive. She should be hearing shoes against the marble floor, movement, the renting of air.

She should be hearing _pursuit_ , and this nothing is terrifying to her. What are they doing? 

She darts into another room situated on the opposite side of the corridor. Large, grand even, bisected by an enormous dining table. She’s ducking outside again, having no wish to loiter in Hannibal Lecter’s fucking _dining room_ , when something bothers her peripheral. 

It’s outside the enormous window on the far side of the room, something marring all the white out there. Something darker than shadows, blacker than midnight. She violently interrupts her forward motion, slides to a halt, turns towards the window.

The _stag._ The stag is standing out there, looking at her through the glass.

It looks the same as always, and she realises that she has missed it in her captivity, used as she has grown to the beast as a near constant companion. This otherworldly creature, eerie, solid. She can see its feathers move in the wind, the thorny antlers outlined by the moon, frosty breath curling from flared nostrils. All the things reflected in its dark eyes, just out of reach for her, but if only she could _touch_ it.

She had come so close in New York. So _close_.

She walks around the large table and all the way up to the window, puts a hand on the glass, wonders what the beast wants with her now. Has it come to lead her away from here, or trap her even more?

“What are you?” she whispers, and watches how her breath fogs the smooth pane, distorting the stag into just a black shape behind condensation. 

And when it clears again she sees Hannibal Lecter’s face in chiaroscuro, reflected in the glass.

He’s behind her.

She whirls around. He stands in the lone entrance to the room, faint light behind him, the dining table between them. He looks relaxed, at ease, but she can see the murder in his outline.

“What caught your attention out there?” he asks, head at a slight tilt, something like curiosity in his eyes, imperturbable and dark. Not at all like he’s hunting her, has for all intents and purposes cornered her.

“None of your business,” she answers, even as she looks for a way around him.

There isn’t one.

Well. No option. She will have to go _through_ him, and she squares her shoulders, ready to strike out, attack, if or when he gets close enough to her. 

Then he moves slowly into the room, starts to come around the table towards her. His smile is cruel, venom dripping from his teeth, his eyes heavy with an odd gravity. Or a _lack_ of gravity.

But she can only truly focus on the arched door opening, how he leaves it gaping and unprotected. She moves with him, matches him step for step. Ensures that the distance between them remains the same, that the large table is always between them. If she can get close enough to the doorway, if she can make a run for it… She’s so much smaller than him, so much lighter. And she’s a runner, a creature of flight.

She’s confident in her ability to outrun him if only given a fair chance.

The man stalking her doesn’t look like he’s in the business of handing out chances, fair or otherwise. He’s coiled and poised, his nostrils flared as if her intentions are scents on the air between them. Maybe they are to him, she thinks; never before has she seen a human being look so like a predator.

A couple of steps closer to the door, Lecter following her on his side of the table, his fingertips leisurely stroking the table top as he goes.

“I would strongly advise you against this, Agent Starling. Come with me now and I’ll say no more of this. You have my word.”

 _Agent Starling._ Not Clarice. That more than anything strengthens her resolve to run, to beat him, because if he catches her she is quite unsure that he’ll let her live.

She takes one step, then two more, then judges that she’s close enough that she might reach the doorway, go beyond, if she’s faster than she’s ever been before.

And she will be. She will _have_ to be.

On the other side of the table Lecter smiles at her. He knows precisely what she’s planning, there can be no doubt. No matter. She’s close to the door; he’s too far.

She launches herself forward, and she’s sure that she’s never run so fast. 

But, even with all that she knows about Dr. Hannibal Lecter she is still entirely unprepared for what he actually _is._ Unprepared for the savage speed, how he vaults himself clear across the table in one leap and lands in front of her. He moves like a ballet dancer, lethal grace and fluidity, the outlines of him blurring with motion.

He’s supernaturally fast, she thinks as she launches herself at him, desperation and primal fear seeing her airborne and coming at him swinging. Despite everything she’s confident in her body, her movements, her strength.

Lecter dodges her, calmly takes a step back that sees her hurtling past him, robbed of an impact, the force of her motion carrying her forward so violently that she barely stays on her feet.

Then, just like that, he’s behind her. Faster than what is reasonable, than she can fathom, his large hand slams over her jugular.

And he immediately starts squeezing. 

Such brute force.

Taking her air away from her like it was always his, never ever hers. 

He pulls her backwards into him, her back pressed to his front. His heart beats steady and slow between the sharp wings of her shoulder blades, while her own trashes like a dying bird in her chest. His other arm comes up over her collarbone, cages her, and she writhes against the sensation of having her life crushed out of her. He rests his chin on her crown and she can feel him nuzzling her hair, her struggles seeming a trifle to him, her gasps for breath a melody as sensual as Goldberg’s Variations. His grip on her is as effortless as it is casual.

 _“Remember Beverly Katz”_ whispers Alana Bloom in her head, and vain notions crumble to ash on her tongue even as she slams her head back, hoping to break his nose.

He whips his head away in time, and her punishment is immediate as he leans backwards, his much greater stature bringing her feet clean off the ground. She kicks, but what can her bare feet ever do against the immense solidness of him?

One of his strong thighs comes out to support her though, resting against her backside. It prevents her entire weight hanging suspended from her throat, and with that it occurs to her that he’ll likely not kill her. 

No, this is a polite rebuke, an admonishment for her temerity in attempting to escape her prison.

Nevertheless, she can feel how she is slipping now. It’s a tangible thing, her consciousness measured in every breath she’s unable to take. The panic is ugly, and it’s shameful. She has always prided herself on keeping a straight head, staying calm.

Not even in Jame Gumb’s basement did she feel this terrified.

She renews her fighting, but it’s just twitches really, a vain scrabbling of nails against Lecter’s wrists, something he seems to shrug off as a mere inconvenience. Her vision hurtles down a tunnel now, it’s shadows and grey on all sides, blackness just ahead.

Lecter bows his head and rests his chin on her shoulder, his cheek brushing hers. He shushes her, the hand not strangling her coming up to gently stroke her hair.

“This is how I subdued Miriam Lass,” he murmurs straight into her skull, his lips on the delicate shell of her ear, and she shivers. Is struck by the thought that he might suddenly bite down, tear a piece of her away. “She lost consciousness very quickly. Would you like to stay conscious, Agent Starling?"

She tries to get her mouth to work, to form just one tiny little word. Impossible.

“Well?” he prompts, even as he squeezes harder, as she hangs helpless between his hand and his thigh.

But she can’t speak. She tries to nod, her eyes wide against the dark of the dining room, but she’s not sure he takes note of it. It certainly would seem not, with the way he holds her like he will never ever let her go. But he must have felt her motion, because he gives her throat one last squeeze, releases it, and gently lowers her back down to the floor.

“Good girl.”

She wants to fall to the ground and curl up around the pain in her esophagus, choke on fresh new air and her failure, but he’s got a hard grip around her arm now and won’t allow it. She bends by her waist instead, tries to collect herself, tries to gather up those pieces of herself that Lecter so carelessly has thrown all over the marble floor.

He barely expended any effort, and she is halfway unmade. Perhaps, even knowing what she does of him, what a violent beast he is, she had never expected that he would use brute force to bring her to heel. Rather, she had prepared herself for emotional manipulation, the psychic driving she had begged Will to prevent from happening to her.

Of course, she thinks, as she stands in the remains of her courage, she had changed any unwritten rules when she decided to run.

He strokes her hair again, seems to have entirely abandoned the careful physical distance he’s so courteously maintained with her up until now. Indeed, as she straightens up again he wraps his arm around her. It’s as much in support as it is in restraint, and she is too weak right now to recoil away from him.

“Shall we go back to your room?”

Rhetorical, of course, as he doesn’t wait for an answer before gently urging her along, his manner now so at odds with the brutal way he strangled her that her mind is struggling to keep up.

Before they leave the room she turns with difficulty to look back out of the window.

The stag is gone, vanished, no trace of its presence out on the pristine snow.

She tries to note her surroundings, memorise the way back to her room. But the large house is kept in darkness, and her mind is doing strange things, flickering like static. Once again, the impressions are those only of winding hallways and large, cavernous rooms off to the sides, of massive windows and lush furnishings. Nothing helpful. She shakes her head, tries to clear it from the haze of drugs she’s sure is in her system, but it’s no good.

Hannibal leads her back upstairs via a much grander staircase than the one she came down, an imperial one with elaborate, baroque railings.

“Will?” she asks Hannibal as they go up it, her voice less than a whisper, broken to shreds underneath his grip. He hears her just fine though. His hold on her tightens, and his jaw clenches in the corner of her eye, but his voice is smooth as he answers her.

“Will is resting in his room. You caused him no lasting damage, but he is prone to headaches as it is.”

He offers no further information, and Clarice shivers with cold. 

Back at her cell he politely holds the door open for her to allow her to enter before him. She does so without protest, right now thoroughly chastised and docile. There is no mess of spilled food and upended plates on the floor, and she wonders if Lecter took the time to tidy before he went to retrieve her.

Such insult.

She is helped to her bed, and instead of taking the chair, or just leaving, Lecter sits down next to her, his shoulder touching hers, a grip on her wrist that plays at being gentle but isn’t. Indeed, there is an awful kind of intimacy in his hold, his strong fingers on one of her rushing life veins, the fragile, birdlike bones underneath. She wonders if he thinks about bringing her wrist to his mouth and biting down.

“How did you kill Francis Dolarhyde?” she asks, voice a rasp, like nails down a chalkboard to her own ears.

“I tore his jugular out with my teeth,” Lecter answers simply.

“What a glutton you are.” 

He chuckles a little then. 

“And Will disembollowed him. Of course, Mr Dolarhyde didn’t go down without a brave fight. And in the end, he got to experience his true becoming. He became the Red Dragon. And Will and I, we finally came together in the cerebral way I had envisioned since the first day I met him.”

He changes the subject then, before she can delve deeper.

“Now, you’ve disappointed me this evening, and you’ve abused our hospitality. I want to see nothing more of this sort of behaviour from you. You are to behave and attempt no more stunts such as this. I will not be so forgiving next time. There will be consequences.”

“You are cruel.”

“‘Cruel’”? he repeats, and the word sounds like it’s beautiful to him, comfortable on his blood-soaked tongue. “All of _humanity_ is cruel, Agent Starling, made that way by an unbridled, tempestuous God. Wild atrocities and pettiness, mindless, naive evil. Tell me, have you heard of JoJo?” At her blank look he shakes his head. “Of course you haven’t. I collect stories like these, just like I collect church collapses. JoJo was a chimp. Taken from his mother as a baby and taught sign language for a scientific study. He became quite proficient too, the level of a three year old human child. Of course, the study ran out of funding as studies often do, and JoJo was sold to a HIV research lab.”

His finger starts tracing the network of veins on her wrist, and she thinks he can feel the way her heart beats, violently, senselessly, entirely without her leave.

“He would be given different vaccines,” Lecter continues, quite merciless and blank, “then a shot of HIV. And there he sat in his little cage, stuffed full of a virus attacking his cells, signing “OUT! OUT!” to anyone who would pass by his prison. Do you know, the cruelty of _that_ astounds even me. A sentient, intelligent creature is torn away from its natural life. It is given a means to communicate _with_ humanity _by_ humanity, and when it tries to use this gift, this remarkable cognitive ability, to get itself away from an unbearable life... it is just ignored.”

“What happened to him?” she whispers and fights a toxic, roiling nausea.

“Died of massive organ failure a few years down the line. And that, _that_ is humanity.”

She’s shaking. Well, she’s shaking _still_ , and she doesn’t understand what he wants her to feel. She detests him for hurting her, for caging her, for rubbing her nose in his own twisted worldview. He’s still travelling her veins with his fingers, a little too hard, like he wants to break through the paper thin skin and put his fingerprints on her blood. Bend her and warp her. It makes her want to lash out, even though it’s the last thing she should be doing right now. 

The very last.

But no matter.

“Will tried to kill you both. He told me. Don’t you think you ought to have let him?”

A sudden coldness to him, a chill worse than the winter she has only just seen through glass. 

“Don’t be rude, Agent Starling.”

“I want you to call me Clarice again.”

She deliberately lilts the last word upwards, turns it into a question that way, because she senses that it would annoy him. That he would find it crass and common. And indeed she sees an infinitesimal tick, just his left cheek moving, and she’s right.

“I think not. You’ve lost your right to be on a first name basis. After what just took place, it wouldn’t be proper. You will need to earn it back.”

“Really, _Hannibal_?” Deliberately she falls into more of her natural drawl, lets the twang infuse her words, and she feels imbued by childhood that way. “After all this time, after you’ve been so thoroughly unmasked, when you walk the world as nothing but _what you are..._ still you insist on the pretension that propriety matters? _You eat beating hearts._ ”

She’s angered him, she can see it in how his mouth tightens just so. Sometime during their struggles his hair was ruffled, it’s falling over his forehead now, and she sees the beast in him, clear as day, right there just under his skin. The maroon in his eyes, the predatorial dips and curves of his thin mouth.

“My desire for politeness and decorum was never part of the act, Agent Starling.”

He gives her wrist one last hard squeeze then stands and walks for the door. Everyone is always leaving her, she thinks, and she feels hysterical, murderous, terrified. 

Lonely. 

“Sure thing, Doc!” she cheerfully says to his retreating back, all West Virginia now, all mountain trash.

She curls up on the bed as soon as the door shuts behind him, and she cries for the first time since all this began.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooof, this update took longer than I'd planned - it was a very hard chapter to write. At least it's quite long. I'd love to know what you think of it :)


	6. dawn

* * *

**Chapter 6: dawn**

* * *

  
  


She’s left alone, and it’s a blessing.

She stops crying, exhausted from the effort, and it’s not like it will help. She pours a bath. Fills the ridiculous tub all the way up to the rim and steps in, water sloshing over the sides. It’s almost unbearably hot, but she sinks down until only her mouth and nose is above the surface. She’s trying to soothe her bruised throat, gentle all the aches and pains of Lecter’s manhandling.

Her other baths here had been fast, perfunctory affairs, Clarice aware that her captors could step through the door at any time. But now she intends to take her time. Somehow, she suspects they will let her be for a good while.

And also, right now she doesn’t give a _fuck_.

She lies there, arms spread, long hair floating on the surface, her hearing distorted by water. She stares up into the ceiling and tries to pull her frayed mind together. 

_Think. Evaluate. Plan._

Well, that escape attempt had not worked out. 

At all.

She is the first to acknowledge that it had been a hasty, desperately cobbled-together affair, but then she had hardly any tools with which to devise and carry out an escape. She simply acted on what she had available, which was nothing.

Now she’s got less than that.

Now she has shown her hand _and_ she deliberately riled Hannibal at the end of it. He had been…displeased and, in retrospect, the look on his face when he left her had been terrifying. She wonders what he would be like _truly_ enraged and then decides not to dwell on it.

She had gravely underestimated him, and that had been unforgivably foolish. Of course, she thinks, of course he would be an efficient, skilled predator. How many kills to his name? Countless. And she had thought that she could outrun him, _best_ him.

Well, now she knows brute strength and speed won’t work. 

And she will have to start over from the beginning.

She will have to play along. Smile, converse. Share of herself. _Engage._

The first goal is to be let out of the room. 

Then she will have to take it from there.

* * *

Will brings her breakfast.

She keeps a careful distance, stands very still by the far wall as he places the tray on the desk as usual. There is a bruise the size of her fist on his temple and a deep darkness in his demeanour. One she does not like.

She decides to speak first.

“I apologise.”

He turns to her, and he does not look amused.

“And for what exactly,” he sits down on the Chesterfield, “- do you apologise, Clarice?”

She’s faintly relieved that he’s still using her first name. 

“For attacking you.”

He raises a brow, crosses his legs. The economy and precision of his movements reminds her of Lecter, so too the even voice. It’s unsettling.

“Not for trying to escape?”

Her answer is immediate.

“It’s obvious I would try to escape. I’ve been kidnapped. I don’t know where I am. Would you not have done the same?”

He doesn’t answer her question, but then he doesn't need to. 

Of course he would have done the same.

“But I regret hurting you,” she reiterates, and she is vaguely surprised to realise that she almost means it. He is a complex, incredibly gifted man, and he’s been kind within the parameters of this situation. Had they met under normal circumstances she thinks she might have liked him.

He smiles a little as he’s studying her, as if he’s privy to her thoughts, as if he can pull strings of words and sentences straight out of her temples. 

Maybe he can.

But his voice, when he speaks, is cold and clear.

“You asked for my protection against Hannibal, Clarice.”

“I didn’t...”

“Oh, but you did. You _did_. And then you hit me over the head and you ran.”

She quiets again. Considers. Will is not nearly as terrifying as Lecter, nor as corrupted in his fall. He fell such comparatively short while ago, after all. He is the weak link, she thinks, the one through which an escape may eventually be possible. 

He shakes his head.

“Oh no. No. No, don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“You’re _comparing_ us, Clarice. You’re deciding that I’m the safer option. Don’t do that. More importantly, don’t _think_ that. It would be a mistake.”

“I am not,” she murmurs through stiff lips. “I’m not thinking that.”

He shakes his head.

“You’re playing games with yourself. At least grant me the grace of not playing them with _me_.”

“Playing games?” she repeats. “Then tell me Will, what games do you play? I’m told it was your idea to bring me here. I think it’s pretty rich to kidnap me, then accuse me of manipulation.”

Her voice soars louder with the last word, and she’s moved away from the wall, stalked halfway across the floor towards him before she catches herself. Her fists are clenched, her chin raised.

Will’s smile is wider now, and maybe-real. Slowly he strokes the shiny, ugly scar down the side of his face.

“When I came into this room you were determined to act the good little captive, weren’t you? Apologise, play along. That didn’t last long, did it?”

He sits calmly in the chair, head tilted back. If he sees her as a threat as she stands above him, he doesn’t show it. He’s not a big man, but he’s wiry. Without the element of surprise, or weapons, she doubts her ability to take him on. No wonder he looks relaxed.

“Why did you really bring me here?”

Will inclines his head.

“I believe Hannibal told you that the alternative would be something of a more.. _.final_ nature.” he says, again not really answering her question,and it is so exhausting to try to find answers hiding between the things not spoken.

She sinks down on the bed. She’s now within too easy a reach of him, but she doesn't think she’s got any violence to expect, of a reciprocal nature or otherwise. 

“It was you who advocated for...keeping me.”

“That’s right,” he says, and once more she is left wondering about Will Graham’s mind. Quantities and measures. Weights and distances. Light and dark. The density of darkness, is it different to that of light? Inside, is he of dappled shadows? Or is the light left in him like that of a star long dead? 

No more than an echo.

“Strays,” she murmurs, looking at the floor.

“I’m sorry?”

“You. You used to collect stray dogs, didnt you? I read that in your files. And you treat me like one of them. You try to save me. You try to calm me, _gentle_ me. Get me to lick your hand.”

His smile is sharp. It doesn’t reach his eyes.

“By that logic I should ignore bad behaviour, reward good. Is that what you are saying?”

She doesn’t want to answer his question. There are too many implications, too many traps. Too many things suggested that she isn’t ready to explore. Maybe she never will be.

“What’s your endgame, Will? Is it for me to beg for your affection? And does your endgame dovetail with that of Hannibal’s?”

He doesn’t want to answer her questions either. He gestures over to the desk, where the breakfast tray stands abandoned. 

“Why don’t you eat?”

She shakes her head. She didn’t have dinner last night, what with it ending up all over Will and the floor, and she has been drinking tap water. As a consequence her head is clearer than it’s been since she arrived here. 

“I’m not hungry,” she says. Then: “It’s the stag, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry?” says Will.

“That’s why you don’t want to kill me. Because I see the stag too. You told me on my first day here that I’m alive because you’re _curious._ ”

He says nothing, but leans forward, towards her, elbows on knees and those eyes of his - how she wishes she could name the colour - they are focused on her temple. 

“You know, I saw it again. Last night, through the dining room window. Just before Hannibal…” she goes silent, can’t bring herself to set Hannibal’s capture into words. How easily and elegantly he overpowered her, how brutally he bent her to his will. The way he touched her, moved her, _ruled_ her. “Tell me what it means,” she implores. “I know you know.”

Will, he once again slides past her wishes, avoids them as gracefully as Hannibal subdues.

“Hannibal...he lies with the truth, you know. You can’t win over him. Ever.”

She leans forward too, where she sits on the bed. They could almost touch each other, they are so close.

“What do you…”

“So stop fighting it. Stop fighting him. Stop scheming. Accept this situation. _Be polite._ For your sake.”

 _Or Hannibal will kill you,_ he doesn’t say, but the words hover in the air between them, clear for them both to see.

He seems almost agonised right now, with those words, and she’s wondering if he’s playing her. Then she wonders if he’s capable. Then she berates herself. _Of course_ he’s capable.

More capable than most. He had, after all, managed to play even Hannibal

So many layers and nooks, and she can’t stop contemplating him; his face that can still be kind, his eyes that can still be soft. The lines curving like gently winding paths around his brow, from his mouth. She could travel those roads of him, she thinks, she could learn more. Maybe, just maybe, she could understand.

And for the first time since she arrived here she wonders if it might be possible to save Will Graham.

She knows he only wants to meet a gaze on his own conditions; as a tool, a weapon. She insists now though. She touches him voluntarily for the very first time, a gentle two fingers under his chin to make him look at her.

“You did. You fought it.”

Will looks away again, and she lets go of him. Respects the boundaries of her captor. 

“Yes. Yes I did. But at great cost.”

“And now? You’ve stopped fighting. You’ve stopped fighting him, you’ve stopped fighting yourself.”

“I have,” he agrees. “God knows I tried. I tried many times, I tried many ways. But, Clarice, I truly do believe that Hannibal and I are conjoined. And the relief when I finally gave myself over… you have no idea.” He meets her eyes then, straight on, and he smiles a little. “Right now, I’m as close to peace as I am ever likely to get.”

The smile shimmers in Will’s eyes, his agony and lust for murder turned into something beautiful. He doesn’t _want_ to be saved.

And just like that, Clarice understands why Hannibal Lecter loves Will Graham so much.

* * *

Later, Hannibal comes to her with a chair. Another Chesterfield, green, matching the drapes. He carries it with casual grace, as if it weighs absolutely nothing at all.

She knows those things are heavy. She knows because she tried to pick hers up and throw it against the door on her second day here. Or maybe it was the third.

He puts it down on the floor in the middle of the room, then pulls out its oxblood sibling from the corner. When the chairs are facing each other he sits, and with a small gesture invites her to do the same.

She obliges, and as she takes a seat she realises that he has arranged the chairs to be so close that their legs touch.

She doesn’t move away, and his knee is warm against hers. 

“I’m in therapy now?”

“The chair suits you, agent Starling. The green against your hair,” he answers. 

“Thank you,” she says, and inclines her head. 

“I trust you have recovered from last night?” He eyes her throat. It’s a tactile thing, that gaze, delicate, yet she can clearly feel it brush the thin, fragile skin covering her jugular. He had not been delicate last night, nor gentle.

She thinks he dreams about biting down.

“Just about, yes,” she answers politely, hands clasped on her lap. “I would like to apologise for that. I was very rude.”

He sits in silence, relaxed as he looks her over. She’s in yet another silk and cashmere lounge set, taupe, and she carded her fingers through her hair earlier to tidy it up. She’s looking as good and as neat as she can considering she’s barefoot and tired and unable to see herself.

“I appreciate your apology, agent Starling. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.”

She wonders at this man, this well mannered murderer doing ugly things in such beautiful ways, and she suspects that to truly understand him would mean insanity.

“And it was a very foolish thing to do, though I suppose you getting a look around does serve a purpose,” he continues. “Now you know you wouldn’t get very far.”

“If you say so,” she answers blandly, and resists the urge to curl up on the chair, draw her knees up underneath her and become small. 

“Will tells me you’re not eating.”

“I’ve had some time for re-evaluation, and I’ve concluded that I’d rather be hungry with a sound mind than sated and confused,” she says clearly, but she tenses, and surely he can feel that against his legs.

Hannibal smiles. It’s terrifying. But when he speaks it’s words of supposed conciliation. 

“I realise now that I… _we_ have gone about this wrong. And so I propose we start over. Get to know each other a little better.”

“I’m listening,” she answers, and wonders if what he will suggest could lead to more autonomy, or snare her even more. With Hannibal, she thinks, it would be both things at the same time, but more of the latter.

“I wish to find out more about you, agent Starling. You are, after all, a valued guest, and we are likely to spend a lot of time in each other’s company. So, how about this: you tell me things, and I tell you. I will ask you about yourself. For each of my questions that you answer truthfully you may ask me a question in return. Or,” he touches a finger to his lips, “- request a boon.”

“A boon?”

“A boon,” he confirms placidly. “You might, for instance, request a cessation of the drugs.”

She looks at him, at his eyes that give nothing away, his cruel mouth, the sharp angles of his face that ricochets shadows in ways she’s never seen before. In the case of Dr Hannibal Lecter, there can be no question of quantities; he is only of dark. There can also be no question that there is tremendous danger in what he suggests, she can sense it, can feel how the situation slips and slides out of her grasp. 

And she knows that she is looking at this from a precipice. That she will have to jump from it before she falls, or is pushed. Because she can’t remain like this forever, and she’d rather proactively break the status quo than be forced into it.

“I agree.”

“Excellent. Oh, but Clarice...” here he pauses, looks at her with a finger in the air “- may I call you Clarice again?”

“Of course,” she says, and it comes out as a croak.

He smiles, and his hand comes down on her leg, just above her knee. It’s warm, and heavy. He doesn’t offer to let her call him Hannibal again.

“It’s unequivocal honesty only. From me, and from you. I give you _my_ word. Will you give me yours?”

She nods.

“Say it, Clarice.”

“I promise,” she whispers, “I give you my word, Dr Lecter.” And she means it, because she knows, she just _knows,_ that he can smell falsehoods. She will give him all of her honesty, and then she will get out of here.

“Very well.” He sits back, and slides his hand from her leg. Their knees keep touching.

“Tell me, what were you hoping to achieve by tracking me down, finding me? And don’t insult my intelligence by saying “for Jack”.”

Her answer is immediate.

“I wanted your knowledge, your insights into the human psyche, specifically disturbed psyches. I wanted to somehow untwist the evil you have done and fashion it into something good. Use it. To help people.”

“You fancy yourself an alchemist, Clarice? You hope to turn death to gold?”

“Yes,” she says. Then: “That was two questions, Dr. Lecter.”

“You are quite right. I apologise. What question would you like answered then, or, what boon would you request?”

“Why did you kill Abigail Hobbs?”

There’s a queer look on his face, one she hasn’t seen before, and she thinks that perhaps she’s surprised him. And there are...resonances in his voice when he answers, acoustics and whispers from a deep cave inside, one with no natural light.

“Will had hurt me. I wanted to hurt him back.”

“”Hurt him back”,” she repeats.

“It was, with the benefit of hindsight, something of an overreaction.”

“An overreaction.” She’s aware that she sounds shrill, but she can’t help it. In trying to comprehend him she finds only incomprehension. “Slitting the throat of a frightened, deeply traumatised teenage girl right in front of the one person that cared the most for her...an _overreaction_?”

“That’s two questions, Clarice.”

She draws a deep breath.

“I apologise,” she parrots him. Then waves her hand in a “your turn” gesture. He picks up right where she made him leave off.

“How, pray tell, were you thinking to use this knowledge of mine, and, I suspect, Will’s? Did you intend to put us in a box each and take us out and ask us nicely whenever you needed our insights?”

She draws a breath to answer, but he carries on:

“You know, I once attempted to eat Will’s brain. I could think of no other way to truly know his mind. Did you think to do something similar with me?”

“What? No! Of course not, I…”

He is quite merciless as he continues.

“Come now, Clarice. You want to know and use my mind, just like you want to know and use Will’s. What better way to do that than by taking us _inside_ yourself?”

She is surprised over the heat she feels at his words, the shiver and the almost languorous sensation as she leans forward in her chair towards him; it’s involuntary, and her breaths going shallow. 

He mimics her, leans forward too. Calm. Sure. A slight smile as he closely studies her face.

“Ah yes, here comes that darkness. It makes your eyes glow. A fascinating prospect, don’t you think, to do good with abyssal urges. To light-paint with darkness. A delicate balance to manage. Do you think you could?”

There is a susurrus in the room, or maybe it’s in her head? It’s that of a thousand wings trashing against walls. She struggles to center herself, to climb back up and out from the emotions he’s awakened in her. Now is not the time to study them, get to know them, analyse them. She will have to do that later, in privacy.

Oh god, and she’s sure that he has barely begun to scratch the surface.

“Yes, Dr Lecter. I had intended, in so far it was possible, to capture one or both of you alive. I had hoped to build a relationship of mutual trust and benefit with one or both of you while you were incarcerated. And, I don’t know if I could manage that delicate balance that you mention, but I would hope I could. I would have to at least _try._ To help. To do _good._ ”

“Are you being honest with yourself now, Clarice? Was _that_ your plan? Leaving aside the tedious bureaucracies of the FBI that would likely deny you access if you’d succeeded, had you really intended to capture us both? Or were you perhaps planning, or hoping, for something else?”

She struggles to steady her breaths, to regain solid ground, to get Hannibal Lecter _out of her head._

“Dr Lecter. That’s two questions of yours I answered already. Now I am owed two boons in return.”

He hasn’t moved, he still leans forward in the chair and the maroon of his eyes are pinpricks of hellfire. They are so close to each other that she can feel his breath on her brow, and she thinks again of last night, of how he had suspended her between his hand and his thigh.

“You are right,” he capitulates. Too easy. “My latest question will have to wait. Now, name your price.”

This is it. This is her chance. Why then is she feeling like she is obligingly sticking her head in a snare? 

“Number one: no more drugs. I want a clear head. And I think that maybe you might want me to be of sound mind too. That was not a question,” she adds hastily. 

He nods once. 

“No more drugs,” he promises, and the ease of his agreement makes her think she was right. He would not have suggested it earlier otherwise. “And your second request?”

She steadies herself. This is crucial. This is an important step towards freedom. She can’t fuck this up, she has to play this right.

“I’ve been cooped up in here for too long. I am used to natural light and fresh air. I am used to running. I am used to keeping myself occupied. At the very least I want out of this room. I want a view. Trees, water. I want some books to read.”

With the way he is coiled, with the smile on his face, she gets the feeling that she’s doing exactly what he wants her to do. _Shit,_ she thinks, _shit,_ what is he...

“Very well. Though I am sure you realise that you stepping outside this room comes with rules and stipulations attached.”

“Of course,” she says, and wonders exactly in which way she might have played into his wishes.

Hannibal extends his hand.

“How about we discuss them later this evening? Would you like to join us for dinner downstairs, Clarice?”

She takes it.

“I would love to, Dr Lecter.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A dialogue-heavy chapter, but from here on at least Clarice’s playing field will expand. As will Will and Hannibal’s...

**Author's Note:**

> The next part should get more into the meat of things. Pun not intended. Honest.
> 
> I’m not a native English speaker, so shout if you see anything weird and I’ll fix.


End file.
